


Under His Care

by BoxWineConfessions



Series: Under His Care [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Acquaintances to Friends to Lovers, Anal Sex, Dr. Shirogane, Keith is a badboy biker with a heart of gold, M/M, Slow Burn, like first kiss happens 30k words in, physical therapy AU, safe sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-04
Updated: 2016-08-29
Packaged: 2018-07-29 09:30:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 52,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7679188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BoxWineConfessions/pseuds/BoxWineConfessions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Keith is living his childhood dream of co-owning the city's most famous motorcycle customization and repair shop. He spends a lot of time with Lance, Hunk, and his best girl Peaches (A 1972 Yamaha DS7). Life is pretty decent, even when he makes the mistake of answering the phone and Lance's mom is on the line chiding him about something he's pretty sure Lance is responsible for anyway. </p><p>Until the accident. </p><p>Apparently having a stupidly hot physical therapist is a pretty good pain killer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Code Pink

**Author's Note:**

> Frantically trying to get all the writing I want to do out of my system before school starts.

He’d been released from the hospital almost a week ago, but it already feels like a lifetime. He spent so much time wishing he’d be away from the constant tubes and wires, and it was finally here. He was actually standing outside, not staring wistfully out a window in between visits from nurses.

He’s also not in his apartment, which is also a plus. It first it had smelled musty at first from being unlived in for almost a month. Now, it’s musty from being aggressively lived in for the past week. He’s done little more than open the door for takeout, and in all honesty it’s been easier to leave the door unlocked in between visitors.

The weather is actually kind of nice today. Keith’s watched relentless snow and freezing rain fall off and on for the past month from inside. However, February typically yields one or two days during the month where the temperature is tolerable, and it tricks everyone into thinking spring is on the way. There will be more freezing rain to more than make up for this one pleasant day in the future.

Before the accident, it had been an extremely difficult winter. He’s grown so used to coming home from work exhausted and having energy for little else other than curling up into a bean shaped pod wedged as far under his blankets as he can manage. Today the sky is not only clear, but the air is crisp. He still needs a coat, but he doesn’t feel compelled to wrap up every inch of exposed skin.  It feels surprisingly good.

Birds are chirping and shit and he can see the yellow gray stuff beneath melted snow that used to be grass. Soon, but not soon enough, there will be little flecks of green mixed in. Yeah, today is pretty good, or at least it would be if the circumstances were different. As it stands the scenery is just kind of pissing him off.

Keith looks down at the big bulky apparatus on his left leg. The boot style cast is strapped from his foot to below his knee. It means that despite the slush on the ground, so he’s been reduced to duct taping a plastic grocery sack over it. It’s ridiculous, but at the same time he knows it’s much better than a plaster. He also knows that despite beginning physical therapy at the hospital, he has a long way to go.

He’d much rather stay inside and pop pain pills while watching crappy day time television in a state of semi-lucidity.

But it was absolutely imperative that he get better and get back to work ASAP. Lance meant well. He really did, and Keith knew this even when he was cursing his name to filth and throwing errant tools at him. He meant well, but he didn’t understand that money didn’t magically pour into the shop. They got more than enough work for two people each day, and he wanted to keep it like that. A further backlog due to his absence wasn’t going to do them any favors.

 So, here he was, halfway across town and blocks away from his bus stop. How hard can it be to find a physical therapists’ office anyway. Google maps made it seem like it was _just_ off the street, and he couldn’t have missed it. Doctor’s offices have big clean signs and the symbol with the snakes.

Even if the office was only a few blocks away he should’ve thought this out better. Crutches suck, and doubly so with the winter snow metastasizing into spring slush.

With a growl he stops, leans forward on his crutches, and fishes a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket. He furrows his brow as he tries to decipher his sloppy handwriting. Shit. He really should’ve taken the time to write these out more cleanly, or at least switched the pen to his dominant hand when he was on the phone.

His brows knit in even further frustration. _Does this say Orchard Street or Orchid Street?_ He looks up at the street signs on either corner of the block. This is Maple Street, does that mean anything? And these numbers ugh. Is that a 3 or a 5? He wanders forward as he walks to the very street corner and absent mindedly waits for the light to change.

“Excuse me.”

If it’s not the next block he’s stopping at the gas station, begging for a phone book. That is, if they still even have one, who other than him, last man on the earth without a smart phone? Then, he’s calling a cab, and praying he still has cash in his wallet.

“Excuse me.”

He looks up from his view of his feet and his crutches. It’s a constant balancing act.

He sees a man with salt pepper hair and big brown eyes lean out of the window of his early model black sedan. “Would you like a ride? I mean, it looks like it might make it easier for you.”

He looks back at his feet, and back at the man, and yeah this must look pretty pathetic. He’d left his knife at home on the nightstand, therapy shouldn’t require busting up fistfights, but they guy doesn’t look like a murderer, so what the hell. “Okay. I don’t think I’m going very far.”

“Just stay there a sec.” The man throws the car in park and scurries over to open the door for him. And, is he offering him his hand while he tries to angle himself down into the seat with minimal pain?“I’m not like, glass I can make it,” he all but growls as the man hovers behind him while he’s trying to get into the car.  

“Sorry.” His hand stays out after he’s awkwardly seated himself in the passenger’s seat. “I’ll take those.”

Keith lets him put the crutches in the back seat of the car.

The mindful part of his brain that always relays important details way too late snaps into action and reminds him a bit too late that the man is just trying to help his pathetic ass.  He waits for the man to walk back around the car to the drivers’ side and get in before he speaks again “It’s okay I mean…I just don’t like being pitied that’s all,” he says as he clumsily.

“I understand. It can be really hard to reclaim agency after a major injury,” the other man says after he’s returned to the driver’s seat. As he reaches for the wheel Keith can see the shining silver digits of a prosthetic hand. Guess he would know something about that.

“So where are you going?”

“Altea Physical Therapy. You know,” he gestures to his leg. “For that.” 

“Oh,” The driver lights up. “Are you Keith?”

“Um.” That was weird. “Yeah.”

“Sorry,” the other man pumps the breaks lightly at a stop light turning yellow. Keith can’t help but think that he could’ve made it through the light, but that kind of reasoning is what got his leg fucked up in the first place. “I’m Dr. Shirogane, you’ll be doing your session with me today.”

“Oh.” Keith watches the corner of his mouth pull into a smile. That makes it significantly less weird, if not one hell of a coincidence.  He doesn’t take his eyes off the road as the light changes back to green, but it feels like he’s looking right at him. “Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too,” He’s turning his left signal on and parks the car in the first space by an unassuming brick building with equally unassuming black shingle roofing. It looks like it might have been a residential home long since repurposed for commercial use. There’s no sword with snakes around it, and the placard near the door that bears the name “Altea PT” was quite small. Keith might have missed it if he hadn’t been picked up. “I’m less worried about running late now that I ran into you on the way. Let me get your crutches for you.”

It’s like this guy has one emotion: not pissed off at the world enough to not smile. It’s just kind of there, soft and genuine. Keith finds it irritating. He’s miserable so everyone else around him should be too.

Dr. Shirogane opens the door for him and follows him inside. The waiting room is not unlike any other waiting room he’s ever had the misfortune of being in. Linoleum floors that are made to look like wood click against his feet. The lounge area is dotted with chairs made of material that feels like laminated plastic. He can only assume that if he hadn’t bumped into the doctor by chance he’d be skimming through last month’s _Newsweek_ while waiting _._ At least it isn’t like the offices of so many well established doctors he’s been in that are lined with pretentious mass produced art prints. Those really make him feel like he’s wasting his time.

“Pidge,” The doctor calls to a seemingly empty waiting room. Suddenly a frizzy mop of brown hair appears from behind the reception desk. “My 8 AM is here.”

“Morning Shiro,” they say stifling a yawn. Their features are soft like a woman’s but their mannerisms, the slouching the scratching, remind him of a man. “Hi 8 AM,” they wave at him. “Shiro,” they step out from behind the counter. “Your 10:30 cancelled, I’m seeing Ms. Kim on my own today since she’s nearing the end of her treatment, and I’m shadowing your 2:30 appointment, so don’t forget,” they pause, push their glasses up their face and hand him a chart.

They’re chewing a big ugly pink piece of bubble gum while she talks. He finds it to be a disgusting habit, but they’d probably find his pack a day Marlboro habit equally disgusting.

“Here’s Mr. Kagone’s chart. As for you,” Keith finds himself under their scrutinizing gaze for a moment. “I need you to fill out your insurance info,” and she hands him a clip board filled with papers as well.

“See you in a moment.” The doctor says with a slightly more intense smile than before. It’s the kind that  should only be reserved for cheesy commercials… Then he walks to the back of the clinic.

Yeah, he slides into one of the chairs whose texture is both slick and grainy at the same time. A Vicodin  and Price is right sounds way more therapeutic than anything else right now.

Across from the row of chairs there’s a fish tank that looks like its seen better days. There’s algae covering at least a quarter of the front panel. Whatever ornament once sat in the middle has been completely overtaken by the fuzzy green stuff. From where he’s sitting, he can only see one oversized goldfish aimlessly floating around the tank. How is it possible for a goldfish to look like that? It looks puffy and bloated as it knocks around the tanks walls.

Halfheartedly he fills out a few lines on the document. The usual stuff: name, age, social security number. When he gets to the list of symptoms his mind sort of glazes over. Didn’t they have his medical records? So he turns back to the reception counter to see the person…Pidge, blowing a large bubble with their gum.

First they inflate it to the size of a golf ball, then a softball, and then bigger. Finally the inevitable happens and it bursts all over their face, glasses and hair. The receptionist sits with it on her face for awhile before standing up with a start. “Shiro?” she move a few shaky steps forward. “Shiro we have a code pink.” She wobbles to the door where to the treatment area. “Shiro, seriously I need some scissors.”

“Again Pidge?”

Dr. Shirogane, “Shiro” appears in the doorway with a pair of scissors. With his coat gone he’s wearing a loose fitting hoodie and a pair of gray joggers. He looks like he’s ready to hit the gym, not interact with patients all day. Then again, physical therapy is probably a little different, and a little more hands on than the usual outpatient setting. Dr. Shirogane is buff. Like in ways that his furious weight lifting and spur of the moment runs in the middle of the night will never produce.

On an unfortunately related note, the combination of being in the hospital for a few weeks, plus being holed up at home for a few more, have killed his interaction with the constant flow of attractive men that wander into the shop with overpriced bikes and no idea what to do with them.

It’s also destroyed his self-control. But he can’t stop staring. He’s spent the past month surrounded by tired and overworked women in ill-fitting scrubs. This man deserves to be stared at. It would be a crime not to.

 Pidge has removed thier glasses, but remains covered in the sugary pink film. “Be kind to your hair this time,” Shiro warns. Then, he strides over to where Keith sits. “Finished?”

“Um, almost,” he says in a soft tone because it reminds him of when Lance busts him for checking out guys at the gym.

He can hear his voice in the back of his head saying, “Man, you have got to learn the definition of subtle. Do you think someone’s going to just see you staring at them like a piece of meat and be like, ‘omg, your creepy unrelenting stare is so hot please let me blow you.’”

“Oh are you at the part that lists your symptoms? We can just talk about that during your session. Come with me.” They cross the threshold into the treatment area and the doctor gestures to a table that’s at hip height. “If you want to you can go ahead and sit down. You can take you boot off too.”

Keith complies.  

The treatment area is lined with the same fake wood flooring seen in the waiting room. To the left of the table are two parallel bars used for walking. On the walls hang resistance bands in all kinds of lengths and thickness. On the other side are a few treadmills, a stationary bike, an exercise ball, and an elliptical. There’s a thin temporary partition after the exercise equipment, and Keith can only assume that it’s mirrored on the other side.

Near the examination table there is a counter. It’s filled with typical physician’s fare. A large glass container of cotton balls, rubber gloves, a seemingly discarded blood pressure cup. There are also chunky off white models of the bones in the hand and spine.

“So your chart indicates that you were in a motorcycle accident?” he asks as he flips through the pages.

“Yeah,” he tenses for a moment on the table knowing what questions come next. He’s been dealing with it from doctors and nurses for a few weeks now.

“Hit and run?” he cards his hands through the back of his hair. It’s more black than gray there and his prosthetic all but disappears in its fullness. “That’s awful.”

Keith’s got his boot off now and has tried his best to stow it upright beside the table for easy access.  He sits there lamely until he’s told what to do next. It smells like antiseptic in the room, and Keith wonders if every doctor gets the same anatomy posters to tack on the wall after they graduate. Or maybe they get different ones for each specialization. He can’t clearly remember ever seeing posters that detail the muscles in the arms and legs before, but he recognizes the serif font on the headers and the off white backing on which they’re printed.

“But I can help you with your recovery,” his flat expression is replaced by a genuine smile. “Can I have a look?” His fingertips rest lightly on Keith’s calf.

“Um, sure.” That’s what they’re here for right? He rolls up the cuff of his jeans to expose his ankle and calf.

“Okay, first of all.” Dr. Shirogane’s fingers gingerly trace over the swollen red hot ball of his ankle.

 Keith hisses in pain at the contact.

“You cannot walk here for your next appointment. Doctor’s orders.”

“Dr. Shirogane, I took the bus here. Now that I know where your office is it won’t happen again.” Normally that kind of quip would get him riled. The only person that could ever get away with telling him to take care of himself was Lance’s mom, and even that got old fast. In the hospital he quickly learned that he had to ask the _right_ nurses to wheel him outside for a smoke. But something about this is so genuine and non-hypocritical, he feels bad about not stopping to ask for directions sooner.

“First you don’t have to call me Dr. Shirogane,” the doctor moves from the counter to behind the partition. He returns with a large ice pack. “You can just call me Shiro. Everyone else does.”

Keith nods. “And  I’m sorry if that came out harsher than expected. I know not everyone can get to appointments easily.”

Keith nods again. Suddenly his mouth feels thick and swallowing is hard. “I just…” he looks at his swollen ankle. “I don’t think you’d want me riding my bike…er…well a bike, mine’s totaled…with the cast.”

“Well, you’re right about that.” Dr. Shirogane. Shiro, replies. “Get ready.” He moves the ice pack so that it hovers over Keith’s ankle.

“I can handle it.”

The ice pack connects, and it takes every inch of pride that he has to not complain. When he and Lance were roommates, Lance would barge into the bathroom while he was in the shower and pour a cup of ice water over him while he was trying to bathe. This was comparable, almost worse.

Shiro sits on his stool and rolls up to the table. “We can’t do much today with your ankle in that state. I’m sure your hip is really sore too.”

Keith nods. It is, but not with the same throbbing intensity as his ankle.

 “We can talk about what your treatment will entail and what other things you may be going through. That way you can get the best treatment for your condition.”

Keith nods again as he tries to hold the ice pack steady.

“So, broken tibia and fibula…surgery to correct that…” he scans the chart. “Bruising and swelling near the ribcage…Fractured pelvis…Right Illiac Wing. That’s why you were in the hospital for so long. Another reason you really shouldn’t be out walking around,” he chides.

“Doctor said it was minor. Six weeks. It’s been five.”

Shiro makes a note on the chart. “Does not follow the recommendations of healthcare providers,” but it’s said in a tone that’s anything but serious, and he makes sure to look up at Keith while he’s writing, and he swears the good doctor winks at him.

Or he was just blinking, and because he hadn’t seen a good looking man in over a month he was wearing what lance lovingly referred to as, “horny goggles.”

“So what has cropped up since your surgery?” Shiro lifts up the ice pack and takes a few more cursory touches at his ankle. By now the angry red area has been enveloped in the cool numbness of the ice and it barely hurts anymore.

But his touch feels feather light and gentle…and it’s probably just the numbness of the ice making it feel that way. So, in addition to fucking up the lower half of his body, someone was trying to charm him to death. Did that count?

“Uh, I’m still on pain medicine. It’s doing it’s job. Although sometimes when I’m out in the cold the pain in my ankle kind of shifts from an ache to a burn. And I know I’m supposed to be off my leg as much as possible, but when I sit down for too long it hurts more. So I stand up and it hurts still.”

Shiro makes note of it in the chart. “And your hip?”

“Just sore. Sore and bruised.”

“Pretty normal for that type of injury,” he adds. “And you’re not back at work yet right?”

“No. Just at home sitting. Sleeping through talk shows and soaps.”

“Pidge always has those on in the waiting room. They drive me crazy,” he says. “Much prefer to have Food Network or something like that on for background noise, but I don’t really call the shots around here.”

You know what drives him crazy? When stupid attractive doctors…

His line of thought is interrupted again when Shiro moves the consultation forward. Okay. I want to spend the rest of our time assessing your movement. So there are a few things I want to see you do. Get up from a laying position, stand from a seated position, walk a few feet. Do you think you’re up for it?”

Keith was up for it, but he never anticipated that getting up from a seated position or even walking a few feet with his crutches would be so exhausting. Maybe it’s the warm, yet critical gaze that never leaves his side. Maybe it’s the soft touches that assess without aggregating bruises or swollen areas. He’s never taken scrutiny well, and he had tired himself out after hobbling down a few city blocks.

When they’re finished Shiro hands him his boot.

It makes him cringe. He’s been wearing that thing around the house a lot in just his boxers. And the injury makes regular showering a pain. There’s a fair amount of sweat and grime lurking within the cast. The lined part probably smell like death warmed over.

“You’re appointments are set up for Monday, Wednesday, Fridays?”

“Right,” He says as he zips up his coat. Shiro holds the door out to the waiting area open for him. “You can get a ride next time?”

“I can work something out.”

“Good. In the meantime…” He pulls a set of car keys out of his pocket. “Pidge?”

The receptionist reappears from underneath the counter with a significant portion of their bangs missing. Guess ‘being kind to her hair’ was optional.

He tosses the receptionist the keys. “I’ll wait for my 9:30 out front. Will you drive Mr. Kogane home?”

“This is outside of regular services offered,” she responds with a snap. Never the less they reach for their coat. “Give me some money too. I’ll get us coffee.”

* * *

“Ugh, can you believe someone could be this tall?” the receptionist asks as they (she? He’s fairly certain she at this point, not that it matters) adjusts the seat.

He sinks into the buttery soft leather seats once again. The car is an old luxury sedan. Top of the line maybe, thirty years ago. The inside smells like stale potpourri. The long nose and huge engine that he knows that lurks underneath the hood reminds him of all the land yachts Lance’s mom has driven over the years. She’d love this one.

 As soon as the engine’s started she’s fiddling with the radio. It shifts rapidly from news radio to pop to hip hop before she finally stops on a metal station.

He winces at the guttural sounds.

“What, too tough for ya motorcycle man?” She backs out of the lot and almost hits a car in oncoming traffic. Maybe this was just part of a scam to get him injured again, get him stuck in physical therapy for months on end.

“It has nothing to do with toughness. It’s awful,” he quips back.

“Uh-huh. Anyway Shiro must really like you,” she raises an eyebrow and takes her eyes off the road to look directly at him. “I think the most he’s ever done is call someone a cab and slip the driver a twenty before they’re out of the lot. And that’s usually only for little old ladies who miss the evening bus. I guess you have great insurance or _something_.” And she says it with a certain tone in her voice. A tone that suggested maybe the doctor was staring at his pinched scowls the way he was staring at his smiles.

Yeah right.

“Anyway, where do you live.”

“Governor street. South side.”

“Wanna see if I can make it there in fifteen minutes?” she asks as she floors it midway through a yellow light.

“Not really.”

* * *

“Wakey wakey eggs and bakey good buddy,” That voice. There’s only one voice that could pull him such a deep sleep like that. _Lance_.

“Go away.” Keith buries his face into the faux black suede of the couch and instantaneously regrets it. The smell of years of second hand smoke and being subjected to years of Lance’s ass have not been kind to it. The acrid smell drives whatever sleepiness he had left away.

“No man. We’re eating dinner.”

Keith rolls back over and sits up. “I was having the best dream Lance…I was sleeping…and no one abused the emergency spare key to my apartment.”

“I know,” Lance plops down on the couch and scoots in closer to Keith so that he’s forced to give the other room more space on the couch. “You’re horribly upset that I have to watch the shop all day and can’t take care of you.” He opens a plastic shopping bag which rests on the table. Two small Tupperware containers are inside.

“Menudo?”

“Pozole. Although, Mom made you a lot of menudo when you were in the hospital.” Lance cracks the lid off the top of the container and spoons in a mouthful before the testing the temperature. In an instant he’s spitting it back out trying to blow air across his tongue. “Ho-hot!”

“That’s funny, I don’t remember actually getting any when I was the hospital.” He takes the lid off of his own food and sets it back on the counter to cool.

“I spent a lot of time and energy at your bedside you know. I think I deserved it. Anyway speaking of Mom, you have got to answer the phone dude, she called me AT WORK because you weren’t answering.”

“I have appointments,” Keith responds.

“I know that. Just, like call her something tomorrow or else you’ll be waking up to her and not me.”  

“How’s Peaches?” Keith changes the subject.

Lance’s expression drops. He tries to burrow his toe into the carpet but he really just ends up grinding it into Keith’s uninjured foot. “I told you, she’s pretty bad…I mean how do you feel about a Peaches II? We have some pretty good parts around the shop.

“Nah,” Keith replies. He grabs his bowl and takes a cautious first spoonful. “Peaches is the only girl for me. Maybe I’ll come into the shop tomorrow and have a look at her, see what I can do.”

They eat in silence for a while. 

“You just think I’m running the place into the ground,” Lance quips. “You want to supervise from the captain’s chair without doing any work.”

“I mean I thought it was in our business charter that you can’t run the place into the ground without me present,” Keith fires back. “But maybe we should hire a temp while I’m out. You can’t do the work of two people.”

“Nah, but I can put on my big puppy dog eyes and ask that our clients be patient because Keith, pillar of the leather jacket and poker run community, is out of commission for a few more weeks.” Lance reaches for the remote among the food, empty cups, old magazines, and overflowing ashtray on the coffee table. “What are you even watching?” He complains.

“I wasn’t. I was sleeping remember?” He watches Lance flip past a cooking channel. “Hey, go back to that.”

“No we are not going into the Food Network rabbit hole tonight dude.” He keeps flipping and settles on a crappy made for TV movie they’ve both seen at least ten times.

“Hey,” Keith plays with the straps of his fingerless gloves for a moment. He’s not going to be riding anytime soon, so why doesn’t he just take them off? Isn’t it kind of stupid that he feels half naked without them? “Can we go out tomorrow night?”

“On a Tuesday?”

He should get whatever this is out of his system before he goes back to therapy on Wednesday. Even if that just means complaining that he can’t shoot pool, or darts, and they should just go home.  Staring slack jawed at you doctor is probably not the best path to healing. “Nothing crazy, I have physical therapy again the day after, and I know you have work. Please man, I have got to get out of the house.”

“Gotta get out of the house, or gotta get laid?” Lance wriggles his eyebrows suggestively.

This kind of thing makes Lance off-putting to other people, but he’s so used to his behavior which so frequently toes the line between cringy and laughable that it doesn’t phase him anymore. The fact that he finds this normal is slightly disturbing, but it’s too late to change any of it now. So he answers truthfully, if only so that he can revel in Lance’s shock.

“Maybe a little of both.”

“Ah...playing the injured angle. Tough, yet vulnerable. It’s kinda hot...I like it, and if it works I’m stealing it from you.” 


	2. Rosalind, Edith, and Martin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cause that's what you're supposed to do with a story right? Vomit all of your world building at the reader all at once?

_Bing bong_

_Knock Knock_

_Bing bong_

_Knock Knock Knock_

Keith begrudgingly forced his eyes open into an exhausted squint. Brunch with Bonita was on the cooking channel which meant it was somewhere between 10:30 and 11:00 in the morning. Who the fuck?

_Bing bong_

“Keith,” a female voice said in a tone that would’ve been too quiet to hear if he’d actually been able to take himself to bed last night instead of crashing on the couch. He was already here and he hurt so badly last night.

“If you don’t open the door I’m calling the cops and reporting you missing.”

That got him moving. He scrambled for his crutches, and got one under his armpit.

_Bing bong_

“I’m coming alright?”

Then he got the other, swung himself upward, and hobbled toward the door. He swung it open, and he knew to expect. Dark brown hair pulled into pigtail braids, an arm loaded with bags of food. Lance wasn’t kidding when he said to call his mother.

So he was surprised when he opened the door to instead see jet black hair pulled back into a bun framing perfectly finished makeup. Her expression aloof. “Edith?” he spoke with uncertainty. She wasn’t cold per se, but she wasn’t the announced visiting type. Or the visiting type.

Then he looked down. He saw the familiar big brown eyes framed by braids pulled tight with pink yarn standing directly in front of the taller woman. He can feel his stomach drop when he finally puts two and two together. “Rosalind too huh?”

Case the only thing better than an unannounced visit from Lance’s mom, was Lance’s moms.

“You didn’t call me back Keith,” the shorter woman of the pair tugs at his shirt until he bends down so she can kiss him on the cheek.

He wipes it away with childish candor.  

Then she pushes past him and lets herself into the apartment. “I was so worried.”

“I told you Rosalind, he has appointments to make,” The other woman says in an exasperated tone. As she walked in her hand pressed gently against Keith’s shoulder in silent apology.

“Well who is taking him?” She says in between collecting garbage off of his coffee table. “He certainly can’t ride those motorbikes like this.” She gestures to his boot with a discarded takeout box. “We can take you to your appointments you know.”

“Trust me, that’s really not necessary.”

“I’m retired now Keith, I can do these things now. I need to do these things now. Empty house all day with Edith. That’s how you kill a twenty year relationship Keith…Anyway, you sit. Rest. I’m going to make sure I can leave here and not be up all night worried about you.”

Keith slinks back to the couch and tries to disappear between the thick cushions. He loves Rosalind, he really does. She’s all but a second mother to him by now, but he’s 27. He’s a business owner. He’s a man with decent credit. Having her come over and just start cleaning is highly uncalled for, and it makes him uncomfortable.

Edith joins him on the opposite end of the couch. She’s a stark contrast to Lance’s biological mother who’s always on the go and never at a loss for mode. Edith, it’s like 90% of her life is spent warming up, getting used to being around people. Then, when you least expect it she’s gets it right. She’s warm, or funny, or just plain clever. Keith likes her a lot.

Wordlessly, she pulls a pack of cigarettes out of the leather satchel draped across her shoulders.

“Thank you,” he replies in a hushed tone. Rosalind’s been chiding him to quit in varying degrees of severity ever since she caught him and Lance out in the alley smoking when they were 13.  Now days, Keith just dealt with the nagging. If Lance wants to indulge, he goes outside of his apartment, and sprays himself down with cologne if he knows he’s going to see his moms that day.

“You have to give me one,’

So he gives the cellophane wrapper a few pathetic tugs before getting it loose. Then, he pulls back the foil and removes two cigarettes from the box. He hands one to Edith, fishes a lighter out of the valleys between cushions, and lights it for her.

“Rosalind,” he exhales after a long drag and lets smoke waft through his mouth and his nose. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Of course I do,” she says from in the kitchen. He can hear the clatter and clank of dishes, and he can’t help but cringe. Those have been in there for a while. Like, to the point where he was tempted to just throw them out and stick to paper plates. “You need to focus on getting better, and it’s really no trouble at all.”

“We’ve already been to Lance’s place,” Edith confesses. She purses her lips together as if she wants to say more, but Rosalind interrupts.

“He needs help too Edie, he’s at work all day now.”

Something heavy settles in the bottom of Keith’s stomach. Yeah, they really needed a temp. Before the accident he’d always open the shop, and Lance would stumble in a few hours later. Then, he’d leave around 5 and Lance would close up around 7.

“I’m going to ask him to hire a temp tonight,” Keith calls into the kitchen. Which was kind of true. He was going to bring it up tonight sure, but when mama McClain hears about it, it’s all but done.

“Edith?” There’s another series of clanging noises. “Make sure you give him the food.”

“Oh yeah,” She snubs out her butt and reaches back into the infinite bag of wonders. “Here,” and sets it on the table

“Thank you Rosalind,” he says. Rosalind does all the cooking because Edith is like him. They’d fuck up boiling water, even if they were trying hard not to.    

“Nothing much just pasta.”

“Thanks for the soup last night too,” he says as he lights up another cigarette.

After a long while, Rosalind strides into the living area with a few bags of garbage in tow. “Edith. Do you mind.” It’s absolutely not a question.

“Kind of.” But she’s already standing and grabbing for her coat.

Keith smirks just a bit. “Never too old to be whipped eh Edie?”

The look she gives him is priceless. Like she wants to throw the trash down, but she’s too afraid of upsetting Rosalind, and she wants to break his other leg at the same time.

“And you, with the smoking,” she points at him. “Doesn’t any of this make you want to turn your life around? Show you that life is precious?”

“Edith-“ gave them to him…”Said the same thing,” he says through gritted teeth, his patience wearing thin.

Rosalind has moved onto his bedroom without so much as asking and has amassed a generous portion of laundry in her arms. “You need a man who can do this for you, that way I don’t have to come.”

She didn’t have to come, but apparently they were doing that today. Pushing all the buttons.

“Why don’t you go down to that club? Martin says the clubs around here are much better than they used to be.” Oh, did Martin say that huh? Martin was so dead the next time they met. “Martin also says they have a cellphone app for that too. You just pick the guys you wanna meet. And they’re all gay.”

 Right Rosalind, because he’s going to meet his future husband after they exchange spelling error riddled messages on Grindr and suck each other off in a dimly lit parking lot. “You guys have it so easy these days. Not like me and Edith met. No excuses. For you or for Lance.”

Rant about bisexuality in 3…2…1….

“Lance especially, he has more options. So definitely no excuses.”

Right, cause that’s how it worked. “Not everyone has their princess literally fall into their lap like you did Rosalind.”

Luckily she changes the subject, ‘”Do you have a washer and drier in the complex?”

“I think there’s one in the basement. I usually just go to the laundromat down the street. Slightly cleaner.”

“Never mind,” she says. “Do you have a basket?”

“No, I usually just shove it into a garbage bag or something.”

“Keith!”

So she just tamed the monster in the sink, gathered up his underwear, which was definitely getting the inside out treatment these days, and rounded up all the garbage in the apartment…But this was gonna be the thing that scandalized her. She goes back into the kitchen for another trash bag and shakes it open dramatically. “I’ll have Martin drop this off tomorrow.”

“Oh come on Rosalind don’t make Martin do that. I’ll get to the laundry. I still have enough clothes for the end of the week.”

She lets out a long sigh and sits next to him on the couch. “Keith, I can’t make you and Lance stop it with the motorbikes. Most people’s kids go through phases. Mine make their stupid teenage testosterone phases into careers…I can’t make you quit smoking. Can’t make sure you eat your vegetables anymore. Just let me do this okay?”

Her eyes lock with his. It’s unsettling. For what cannot be the first time, but certainly feels like it he can see the silver strands of hair that intermingle with the darker strands. He can see the wrinkles around her eyes and the puffiness beneath them. She actually looks old.

Pangs of guilt throb at his temples. All the missed calls and Sunday afternoons where he could’ve gone with Lance to visit but he didn’t.

Luckily Edith reenters to pull him from his brooding. Wordlessly she pinches another cigarette from the pack. Keith follows suit. “Rosalind, let’s get going soon. It’s snowing again. You know I don’t like driving in the snow.”

“Fine fine.” She hefts the bag of laundry over her shoulder and bends down to give him a kiss on the cheek.

“Thank you,” he says in a voice that’s just above a whisper.

“Call me before the end of the week, or I will call the cops on you.”

“Rosali-“

“We have a lot of kids, but we only have one Keith.”

* * *

The lie was that Rosalind had really worn him out in the brief thirty minute visit they’d had that morning.

The truth was that Keith dreaded unstrapping his boot and changing his pants. Too lazy to change his own pants…Man, he had really let his life go to shit in about a week and a half.

Unfortunately Lance could see straight through all of it.

“I don’t know man, I’m really tired and sorer than usual tonight.”

“I knew it was too good to be true when you voluntarily said you wanted to go out. You were having hallucinations from those pills or something right?

“I got Rosalind’ this afternoon,” he confesses. “Edith’d too.”

“Ohhhhh.” Lance’s mouth tugs into a smile. “That’s why it doesn’t look disgusting in here right now.” Lance takes a few strides from the couch over to the coat rack and grabs Keith’s red and white leather jacket. “Well that’s too bad, because I’m tired as hell tonight, but I’m still taking your sorry ass out for a while.”

Keith shoots him a glare.

“Dude, you need to give your couch a rest.”

“I’m just not feeling it Lance.” He’s probably going to bend within a few turns of the conversation, so his curt tone was inappropriate given the situation.

“Ohh….” Lance repeats. “I get it. Ya masturbated and now the need to stare down helpless men has dissipated. That’s actually a really good approach. I’ll have you know I use it myself often. Especially when-“

“Oh my god stop.” Keith says as he makes his way over to the door. He snatches his coat out of Lance’s grasp before he can continue.

“Well, I’m glad you changed your mind Keith,” he says with a grin.

“How do you even handle these steps man?” Lance asks once they’ve left the apartment and Keith’s locked the door.

“Very carefully,” he says putting one crutch on the first step. “By the way, your mother basically told me to use Grindr today.”

Lance’s eyebrows temporarily migrate to his hairline. He visibly shakes off the shock and dips his hand behind the collar of his coat so he can rub his neck and hairline with a nervous palm. “Yeah…I think she takes a certain amount of pride in being the cooler, hipper queer person than her queer children.

“Is Martin working tonight?” Keith asks.

Lance is parked on the street. As soon as Lance unlocks the door Keith hoists himself into the passenger’s seat of Lance’s car. For a Volvo Wagon with more than 200,000 miles on it he’s kept it pristine. Not a scratch on the paint, not a piece of stray garbage anywhere within. Never, has it ever smelled like smoke. Sole survivor of Rosalind’s yacht fleet.

“I don’t know. She text me earlier asking me about some kind of some kind of issue with the roommate. The crazy one.”  Right cause that narrowed it down. “Didn’t mention that we were dropping—“ Lance interrupts himself “Dude let me adjust the seat so you have more space to-“

Too late he’s already inside.

“Why are you so stubborn about everything?

“Why is everyone treating me like I’m some kind of infant made of glass?”

“Um,” Lance shuts the passenger side door and scrambles over to his own. Once the door is open he speaks once more. “That is an awful analogy.”

* * *

Hunk’s place was a pillar in the community. Literally everybody who was anybody in the city’s bike scene has put their fair share of mileage on the bar stools here. As they pull into the parking lot, Keith’s reminded of why. The old neon street sign out front’s been broken almost since the day Hunk opened. First it flickered, and now it simply says in iridescent yellow cursive, “unk’s Place.” Even in the dead of winter and on a weeknight no less, a row of bikes are parked out front.

The building has weathered wooden siding so that it almost looks gray in the sunlight. The front and rear entrances are lined by a wraparound porch. In the summer it’s nice to just stand out on it with a beer and shoot the shit well into the night.

Or in Keith’s case he’ll stand a respectable distance away from Lance while he shoot’s the shit. That method keeps him out of trouble, keeps him from getting hauled up by the lapels of his jacket and threatened, but close enough he can hear every tragic word.

Or he’ll stand out here and try to dodge maintenance questions in his off hours. He’ll hold firm and buffer them all night Inevitably though, he’ll get enough beers in him, and someone will be so clueless that he’ll gruffly demand to take a look at whatever the problem is.

But it’s the dead of winter so the porch is probably the least hospitable part of the place right now.

Lance holds the door open for Keith “After you M’lady,” he says with smile that’s far too big for the level of humor embedded in the joke. Calling him a girl? That was straight face material.

Keith strides in to see a woman that could easily be Lance’s twin at the bar. She’s tall to the point of being lanky. She’s got a dark complexion with dark hair that’s pulled into a messy bun. She’s wearing a black crop top he swears he’s seen lance wear out to the clubs before. So, that begs the question, which one stole it from the other?

As they enter, she looks over to the door. Her eyes go wide, and she shoves the rest of the drinks on her tray at the customer at the rails. “KEITH You’re alive!” And without so much as lifting the gate that separated the bartender’s area from the rest of the place she hops the bar and runs over to them.

Long arms wrap around his neck and he’s enveloped by the overpowering scent of patchouli. “Seriously. It’s so good to see you up and walking around.” She pulls back and plays with the long ends of his hair.

“Nice to see you too Martin,” he says with a small smile.

“Look at that Keith’s happy to see me Lance!” She pokes at a small dimple that always crops up when he smiles.

“Um hello, I’m here to Marty. Way to ignore your brother.”

She moves over to Lance and wraps an arm around his shoulder. Then, she pulls him in for a headlock and tousles his hair. “Don’t be a baby. I’ve actually seen you conscious in the past month.”

“Stop!” Lance complains. “I put product and everything in it tonight.”

Did that mean Marty came to see him in the hospital? The nurses told him how long he was out, but it’s still hard to quantify.

“Tragedy dear brother. Absolute tragedy.”

“Go sit.” She orders, “I’m going to the kitchen to get Hunk.”

Keith and Lance have to forego their favorite pair of barstools right next to the rails. The last thing he wants to do right now is try to heft himself up there with the boot strapped for his leg. So instead they settle for a booth just opposite the bar. The dark booth is lit by an overhead hanging light made with tacky mock stained glass. It boasts the “Strohs” beer label. The wall that the booth is jutted up against bears a large vintage ad for Triumph motorcycles. Although the ad is stained by old beer, and nicotine, and time, it still looks like a watercolor and not a piece of mass produced ad copy.

Keith’s spent many a night staring it down from across the bar.

Martin has hopped back over the bar and has pushed open the door to the kitchen. With her body half in the bar and half in the kitchen, she yells, almost too loudly, “Hunk, you’ll never believe what kinda garbage just walked in.”

After a few moments hunk’s large and imposing form can be seen from the small window in the kitchen door, and then he emerges. His eyes all but threaten to pop out of his head and his eyes go wide when he sees whose sitting at the table. “Keith!”

And then there’s more hugging. Keith can feel Hunk physically restraining himself with the hug, making sure that he doesn’t pick Keith up and swing him around, which is pretty customary for a Hunk hug. “Oh dude it is so good to see you.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Its good to be here.” And yes, even though his leg smarts like a sonofabitch he has to admit that it’s much better than spending another night decaying on the couch.

“Sorry I didn’t make it to the hospital myself to see you man,” Hunk says as they break contact. As they pull away, he realizes that Hunk has transferred, flower or sugar or something from his big white apron and onto his jeans and shirt. He tries not to look disgusted as he wipes himself clean. “But Lance gave you the cupcakes I sent along right?”

Keith’s expression shifts from annoyed by flour to all out murderous. “Cupcakes Lance? You withheld  cupcakes from Hunk?”

“I um,” he taps his index fingers together in anxiety. “Was busy-“

“That ‘taking care of me’ bullshit won’t work this time, those were _Hunk’s_ cupcakes.”

He doesn’t fault Hunk for not coming though. He’s spent endless hours in the bar. He’s even serviced his bike before. It’s an impossibly big, needlessly ostentatious yellow Harley Davidson trike…But it’s not like their super close.

But it’s no secret that Lance is the glue that keeps him connected to whatever little community they find himself involved in.

After almost seven years of knowing each other, they’re probably little more than super acquaintances in each other’s lives.

“The regulars boys?” Martin has reemerged from behind the bar with two draft beers in her hand. Before they even had time to respond she’s got them on the table in front of them. They don’t have much choice in the matter.

“Keith’s still on pain meds,” Lance reports.

Keith glares, because he’s not in the mood to get told on. “I’m fine. I didn’t drive and I haven’t taken a pill in a few hours.”  And by the time he finishes the sentence he’s talking through gritted teeth. This injury has forced himself to explain himself more than he ever has before and he’s sick of it.

“Yeah, plus you’d look like a total loser if you were drinking a non-alcoholic beer,” Lance says as he decides to let the topic drop.

The place is pretty dead, it being Tuesday and all, so Hunk crowds in on Lance, and Marty sits next to Keith and they begin the somewhat arduous process of catching up.

Well…It’s arduous if it’s a regular day. And if all you’ve been doing for the past month is sleeping, taking medication, and having surgery well…It’s agonizing.

He takes the time to answer all of their questions, even if he really doesn’t want to. With great patience pulled deep from within he reports that he’s going to be in the boot for another 6-8 weeks. His hip is healing nicely. He’s doing physical therapy three times a week, and he should be off the pain pills in another 1-2 weeks.

And no, they haven’t caught the guy that plowed into him yet.

Listening, he decides, is arguably less excruciating.

Hunk’s pretty sure there’s a new gang on this side of town. No known leader or name, but he busted up five fights over the weekend, which is a rarity even in this place where the booze flows freely and everyone’s got something to prove.

Martin’s roommate has moved out without any notice, so she has to come up with another $400 bucks for rent.

At that Keith perks up. Marty needs rent, they need a temp, and finally all those years of having her hang around while they strung together whatever metal scraps they could and called them dirt bikes might be paying off.

“If I get a side job I need them to work around my shifts here…And mom says you’re gonna hire somebody maybe?” she finishes.

“Absolutely not-“ Lance slams his beer down on the table. “We don’t hire siblings. We just pawn them off on Hunk.”

To that Hunk gives a hearty chuckle.

Damn Rosalind works fast. He mentally takes back every exasperated sigh and eye roll he doled out this afternoon.

“Oh come on! Just temporarily so I don’t have to worry about, you know getting evicted!”

Lance snorts, “Why don’t you have Toni move in with you?”

“Oh my God how can you even say that?” She all but shrieks. Most of the McClain siblings get along well enough…To the extent that hugs and kisses were interspersed with slaps and pinches. Even that now that the youngest were in their late teens, Keith can’t remember the last Thanksgiving that didn’t have a fistfight in the middle.

That being said Toni and Martin were like fire and gasoline.

Hunk excuses himself from the booth when he notices a few patrons have lined up at the rails for drinks. “I’ll let them hash this out…I’ll put a two specials in for you guys?”

Keith doesn’t even have to ask what the special is. Hunk makes the best food in town. Like, it’s weird how good the food is for this being a dive bar. Huge portions, decent prices, he’d eat anything that was placed in front of him.

“Look, if you don’t like what I do just fire me after a week.”

“You think you could last a week at what Keith and I do? I’d be shocked if you could hang in there for a day.”

“At the very least let me help you on the front end. Answer the phones, keep the books stuff like that.”

“Nope.” Lance stretches out in the booth now that Hunk has gone so that his sneakers poke out into the isle.

“I cannot believe I’m begging you to let me help you.”

“That’s not exactly what’s happening here.”

Keith tries his best to stifle the smile that’s forcing his mouth to curl at each end. For the first time during the night he doesn’t feel incredibly awkward or shamefully out of place. If they see, they’ll turn on him.

* * *

 

“I’m never taking you out again,” Lance says after dinner, another beer, complementary dessert because Hunk insists, and more arguing with Marty. “Or letting my moms help you.”

Keith rests his elbow against the car window and holds his forehead in his thumb and forefinger. “But I’m the stubborn one.”

“Whatever.” Lance probably wants to give him the silent treatment, but it’s Lance, so he can’t. “Shame there weren’t more people there tonight. I’m ready to get back on the prowl if you know what I mean.” Keith can see him wriggling his eyebrows suggestively again. It makes him want to punch him in the face.

“I have no idea what you mean Lance.”

“That’s because you haven’t been laid since the dawn of time,” the other man decides.

“Hey. I need you to drive me to physical therapy tomorrow too.”


	3. Panty Dropping Smile

“Quitting time,” Shiro announces. Playfully he bops Pidge on the head with a manila file folder.

“Is that Ms. Collier’s file?” She asks scrambling for the folder.

“Yeah,”

“Then let me update her file and generate the bill.”

“It can wait,” Pidge had already run errands, updated five patients’ files, shadowed a session and conducted one solo. She was doing too much. “Besides, don’t you have an exam tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” she says with a scowl. “Advanced Phys.”

“Oh, so you’re going to ace it.” Pidge’s major was human biology, and because that wasn’t ambitious enough her minor was in physiology. Where he’d barely acceptable grades in some of those upper level anatomy and physiology courses because he couldn’t quite remember the difference between the nine different structures in the skull that bared the name “suture,” sphenofrontal suture, sphemopartial suture…Pidge’s mind absorbed it all like a sponge.

“I’m feeling like I’m in B+ territory, if I’m going to be honest.”

“Well, let’s do some last minute studying,” he suggests. “I’d never forgive myself if I worked you so hard you’d only manage a B+”

Pidge makes a foul sound that’s somewhere between a snort and a laugh. “Fine,” She pulls a thick physiology textbook with hard back binding out of her book bag. “But we’re not just sitting here, I’ve been sitting all day since you had most of the patients.”

So they go back to the treatment room. Pidge takes up residence at the stationary bike, and Shiro goes to the treadmill. He balances the thick book on the impossibly small ledge on the treadmill. Then, he adjusts the machine to a warmup setting. “What wonderful part of the human body are we being tested on?”

“Well it’s phys, so technically it’s less about the parts and more about the process,” She says while she ups the resistance on the bike. “But the enteric nervous system is giving me the most trouble, so let’s start there.”

“Digestive system? It’s been awhile.” He flips a few pages in the book trying to find the appropriate chapter and maintain his balance on the treadmill.  You’re going to have to explain things to me.”

“It’s highlighted with a purple bookmark tab,” she says watching him flounder.

“Right,” he turns to the proper chapter. “So, tell me everything you know about this guy. Mr. Enteric, commander of the gut.”

Pidge sighs. “Alright, so…” She grips the handle bars on the bike and leans forward. A cursory glance at her machine reveals that she’s on hill climb mode…Probably with the resistance set too high. “It operates independently of the brain and spinal cord…. There’s two components.”

“Known as…”

“plexuses. Submucosal and myenteric.”

“Submucosal,” Shiro interrupts. “Delicious.”

“So good man.” Pidge replies. For a moment the only sound between them is Shiro’s steps and the whir of the bike’s large wheel fan. “Anyway the delicious submucosal thing,”

“Plexus,”

“Controls secretion and absorption. The other one…..” She pauses. “The other one does something.

“When you’re hungry your stomach does what?”

“Oh!” Pidge raises a hand as if she’s answering a question in the classroom. “Contractions.”

They go on like this for awhile until Pidge gets stuck on differentiating between the two types of ganglia within the system. Shiro suggests she read for awhile…Pidge has other ideas.

“So what was the deal with that guy today?”

“Hm?” Shiro says absentmindedly taking a draught from his water bottle. “Oh, I don’t know I felt bad for him. I also felt like he probably wouldn’t be the kind of person who’d actually listen and take a cab home or something.”

“Uh-huh,” Pidge raises an eyebrow. “Cause he’s not at all your type.”

“Pidge, how would you even know what my type is?” She’s only ever seen him in one serious relationship. He’s not exactly the type to have one night stands, and if he did, he certainly didn’t spill the details to his mentee.

No matter how frequently she hounded him for details.

“I think I know what your type is. You want to help somebody. Where most people would refurbish furniture or something, you want a project boyfriend. A challenge. You know, melt that resting bitch face exterior and reveal the warm caramel center. Or something like that.”

Shiro swallows a knot that’s built up in his throat since she started talking. As much as he’d hate to admit it she’s kind of right. The patient this morning did push all the right buttons. Attractive, starkly different from his own personality…In need of help but would never ask it. Damnit Pidge.

“Nah, I gotta go with someone that doesn’t give me more gray hairs,” he decides after a moment. “What about you? Maybe instead of hanging out with your boss after work hours you should meet someone yourself.”

Pidge snorts again. The awful noise gives way to a small constant giggle. So much so that she has to lean forward on the machine and hide her face while she pedals. “I’m trying to get all my credit hours of coursework done this semester. And get my shadowing hours done. And make sure your appointments are set. I don’t have time for that.”

“You don’t have to work so much Pidge.” This semester she was taking two night classes, and an afternoon class on Tuesday Thursday. She also took credits for her internship here. Shiro knew she was spread thin. The med school track wasn’t particularly kind to anyone…But he’d never want her to miss out on an experience simply because she felt compelled to be here.

“I want to be here. I like it here,” she decides finally.

She probably wants it to be the end of the discussion between them, but it’s opened a very topical issue that lingers constantly between them. “Have you heard back from any schools yet?”

“No,” she says with a certain degree of frustration. “You saw my MCAT scores, they suck.”

He has seen the scores. They don’t make a lot of sense. Pidge’s grades are stellar. She tests well. “You could always apply to PT school like I did. In and out in three years. A lot less debt.”

“Yeah, I’ve thought about it.” She stops pedaling for a moment. “I’ve also thought about just doing a gap year. Get more hours with patients logged. That is, if you’ll keep me.”

Another tangible bit of tension hangs between them in thick ugly strings that connect the treadmill and the stationary bike. He was glad that Pidge liked it here. He couldn’t be more fortunate in finding part time help. But, this place was small. They had a handful of clients at any given time. She might be able to have better and more meaningful experiences at a bigger clinic.

“Well,” he sucks air in.

She grimaces. They’ve had this conversation before. It’s never went well.

“You know my thoughts on that.” For his own internships he’d shadowed at the university’s research hospital, the athletic training facility, and a smaller outpatient office before he went for his DPT.

“Let’s change the subject so I’m the one making you uncomfortable.” She starts pedaling again so that the machine doesn’t reset and put her at the bottom of the fictional mountain again. “No no no,” she pedals faster and faster until the resistance kicks in again. “There we go.”

“You’re insinuating that I’m not made uncomfortable when my assistant tries to tell me what my type is. You’re also insinuating I’m totally comfortable talking to you about your bright and promising future,” Shiro quips. “I’m not exactly qualified for that.

“You have your own practice, and don’t seem completely miserable with your life.”

Shiro winces at the choice of words. _Completely?_

“I think you’re doing okay.”

“I took the circumlocutious way of getting there.” He adjusts the speed on the treadmill so he can shift into a proper sprint since studying has apparently been thrown out the window.

“Anyway, I spoke with Matt the other day. He wouldn’t mind getting together with you for lunch. For old times sake I guess.”

Shiro feels a sharp feeling rise from his gut to his chest. Even though it’s been four years, and they’re something like friends and all but family now that Pidge is working for him it, still feels weird whenever they meet up. “I have a phone, and I’m pretty sure he has my number.”

“Yeah, that would require you answering it.”

“Look, it’s nothing personal-“

“I know, I told him you never answer the phone. That’s not the issue. Maybe you should just go see him. It’s certainly not going to hurt anything.”

They finish their routines in silence. Pidge steals the book back from him and reads for a bit while he finishes out the hour in a dead sprint. Pidge definitely succeeded at flipping the script if that was her intention.

Then again…it had been awhile…and maybe she was right. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt anything.

He turns off the treadmill as soon as the timer hits sixty minutes. “Let me take you home tonight?”

“Nah,” she says as she gets off the machine too. “I’m gonna take the bus down to campus. Library’s open all night and so is the coffee shop next door.”

Both of them gather their things. Shiro sets the alarm for the building and the walk out together.

“See you tomorrow Shiro.”

“Good night Pidge.”

He unlocks his own car and sits in the driver’s seat with the ignition off for a moment. He ignores the sting of the cold that begins to nip at his ears and his nose. Instead, he gets his phone from his briefcase, and scrolls through his contacts for awhile. The blue light stings his eyes in the darkness, but if he doesn’t do it now he probably won’t.

He finds the number he was looking for and hits the green ‘send’ button. Just as quickly as he presses the button, he slams the red ‘end’ button.

* * *

“Wow, I can’t believe you actually listened to me.” Pidge says in between mouthfuls of sandwich.  “I mean well…Kind of.”

“If you get mustard on that, I’m not running home to get you a new shirt or anything.” Pidge’s made a habit of needing a shower after lunch. Shiro should just bring some of his old t-shirts from home and shove them in one of the empty filing cabinet drawers for Pidge.

“Ya, boss.” She says as she crams in more sandwich. “You nervous?”

“What do you mean?” He asked her as he unwrapped his own sub.

“You called and hung up after two rings.” She takes another large bite of the sandwich and takes an entire tomato slice out with it. Awkwardly she tries to stuff it back into the sandwich, but it doesn’t line up with previous bites and she just ends up pushing shredded lettuce out of the sides. “So I hear anyway.”

At least it answers the previous night’s question of why Pidge isn’t seeing anyone right now.

“It’s no big deal. Probably another clinical trial or something,” Pidge finally comes up for air from the sandwich and dabs at her face with a napkin. Then, she tosses it on the pile of greasy used napkins. “I guess a change of subject is in order. Excited about tomorrow?”

“Yes,” Shiro confesses. “I live for Wednesdays. It’s double coupon day at the market. So I’m picking up milk, crackers, maybe some bread. People that live alone can’t finish a loaf of bread in time. It always goes moldy. Wanna start splitting bread? That way it doesn’t go to waste.”

“First of all, you know what I’m talking about Shiro.”

He stares back at her over his sandwich. He refuses to take the bait.

“Your 8 AM. Second of all, yes. I kind of do, but I only eat wheat bread.”

* * *

 

“You mean to tell me that I’m paying through the nose so that you can wrap a rubber band around my foot and watch me stretch it out?” Keith is sitting on the examination table staring incredulously at the red band in Shiro’s hand.

“Not exactly,” Shiro bites back a sigh. He has to deal with patients like this daily. Patients that think they could get better by watching videos and performing exercises at home. It’s still mildly upsetting. He encircles Keith’s toes with his prosthetic hand and with his other he wraps the red rubber strap around the ball of his foot a few times. Once it’s secured, he hands each end to the patient. “You’re also paying for other invaluable services. Like later I might ask you to sit on a chair with your feet flat and raise and lower them. Or we might do something exotic like the treadmill.”

“Uh-huh that’s what I thought,” Keith replies. He begins to flex his foot, and Shiro watches how the muscles in the ankle constrict and retract.

“I went to school for three years post baccalaureate so I could be qualified to use the rubber band I’ll have you know.” He’s possibly crossing a line here, from small talk that was integral to getting through a session to slightly unprofessional.

Keith makes an exasperated huffing noise. “Oh, so you minored in treadmill ethics.”

Now it’s Shiro’s turn to smile. Sometimes it takes weeks to connect with a patient that still hasn’t come to terms with their injury, someone who’d rather be anywhere else. Someone like Keith. If snark works then he works. He has a trump card in his back pocket for interactions like this. Spending anywhere from 30 to 40 hours a week with Pidge would hone anyone’s sarcasm skills.

He’s just glad he can finally put them to good use. He and Pidge knew each other so well they were rapidly running out of material to use on each other.

“It was a graduate concentration I’ll have you know,” he says with a slight chuckle.

“Oh, I’ve also got this place figured out,” Keith continues in a matter of fact tone.

“Oh really?”

“Yeah-“ but he stops when Shiro places his hand back on his foot and holds it for a moment.

“Sorry,” he straightens out Keith’s ankle. “You have to keep it straightened out, or you’ll just make it feel worse.”

“Oh. Right.” Keith continues stretching his foot in a forward and back motion.

“Anyway, you were saying?” Shiro encourages him to continue. He hasn’t seen Keith this animated before, and it’s always nice to see patients come out of their shells. Shiro believes that it is very conducive to healing.

“Oh yeah,” He takes a moment to adjust his grip on the band. “You get people in here, they start treatment, and then you let your secretary get their hands on them. I was fairly sure she was going to kill me yesterday. Your patients get more injuries, and you’re sitting on a scam that the insurance companies can’t bust you on.”

“Okay that’s enough of that,” Shiro says gesturing to the band. “I want you to repeat this exercise three times a day, five sets of twenty reps each time okay?”

“Avoidance. So it’s true,”

“I’ll have Pidge prepare you an instruction sheet to take home if you forget. Let’s move onto those seated leg lifts.”

Keith switches over to a folding chair near the table and Shiro follows. Shiro shows him the proper form first, and Keith copies. It’s a simple exercise. Press up on the balls of the feet, hold, and go back down.

“Also, I’m afraid you’re wrong. I’m not in it for the insurance money. This whole business is actually a front.”

Keith’s eyebrows raise in suspicion.

“Illegally imported chocolates. Kinder Eggs and the like. Pidge pulled me down into the deep dark underbelly of smuggled sweets and I just can’t escape. She’s cooking the books so that when we unload the sweets it’s billed as a patient. No one will ever know.” He really should stop, this is getting beyond ridiculous.

“Thank you for the ride though,” Keith says in a hushed tone.

“You’re welcome. I admit it’s not something I usually do. I hope it didn’t…upset you.”

Keith shoots him a questioning look.

Shiro explains himself. “It seems like you’re a very independent person. Part of the healing process is regaining that independence. I hope I didn’t overstep my boundaries on that.”

“You’re not apologizing for giving me a ride,” Keith says with a huff. “It was a nice gesture. I hurt like hell, and I probably would’ve felt like death if I’d walked all the way to the bus stop.” He stops to take a sharp inhale, as if the entire process is more taxing than the exercises. “ So, thanks.”  

It’s the most he’s heard Keith say at once. He can feel the slow evil creep of secondhand discomfort settle into his stomach. The kind that only shows up when he knows he’s made someone uncomfortable. He needs to change the subject. “Okay, I think we’ve given your ankle enough attention. Let’s move onto your hip.”

Keith grabs a crutch and gets himself standing.

“You can get back on the table for these.”

“Shiro you’re killing me. Table, chair table,” he grabs a crutch and moves back over to the examination table.

“Usually these are done on the floor, but I don’t think you’re ready for that yet.”

“If I got down there you’d probably have to pick me up.”

 Shiro can’t help but notice the grimace Keith makes when he finishes talking. He wants to tell Keith that it’s okay. That he gets far cheesier comments and far worse pickup lines from other patients and that was literally top tier. Barely phases him at this point.

But he doesn’t because _that_ is undeniably unprofessional.

“Okay, lay back.”

Keith complies. They lock eyes for a moment as Keith stares up at him. His expression is relaxed, his mouth open instead of being firmly clamped shut in a near scowl. One part of Shiro’s mind notices that it’s a nice contrast to his usual expression. The other part pushes it out of his mind.

“So we’re going to start with hip and knee bends. I want you to bend your knee as close to your chest as possible, without it hurting and hold for five seconds.”

Keith complies and bends his knee, holds, then relaxes. He repeats the exercise. “I cant bend it back any further without it hurting,” he says with his knee at a ninety degree angle that’s perpendicular to his torso.

“Okay,” Shiro furrows his brow in concern. If Keith is almost a month out from a simple fracture, he should be able to have more range by now, but if Monday’s visit was any indicator, he’s probably over exerted himself and delayed the healing process. He has to rule out stress and swelling. “I want you to perform the exercise again. This time, I want to feel how your muscles move and note where there’s swelling or inflammation, if any.”

“Okay,” Keith repeats the motion.

Shiro rests his hand on the high point of Keith’s hip. His thumb and forefinger press gently against his Illiac crest.

“Do I have to pay extra for this? Under other circumstances I probably would“ Keith says in a flat tone.

But there’s no other way to interpret it. “Only if you keep saying things like that,” he says with a smile to let Keith know that he’s not offended, but he’s not entertaining that particular line of conversation.

Once more,” Shiro requests. Then his hands move to the side of his hip. He feels the muscles contract beneath his hands. It’s swollen, but nothing that would require an increase in anti-inflammatory medication. “Does it hurt when I touch it?”

“A little bit. But, it’s not as bad as my ankle the other day.”

* * *

 

“Do I have to pay extra for this?” Shit, if Lance used that line he’d be giving him hell. If Lance heard him say that he’d be dragged, roasted, and have his grave spat on…in the form of verbal insults. Seriously, what the fuck was wrong with him?

The doctor was going to refer him to someone else. Or better yet, he was going to get blacklisted from all physical therapists in the city. His regular doctor would ask him why he’s not making any progress and he’s going to have to confess that he creeped on his physical therapist.

But his hand on his hip, in addition to stinging, reminded him that he was so damn contact starved.

“Only if you keep saying things like that.” And then he flashes one of those panty dropping smiles. As if the situation cannot get any worse.

Keith can feel the heat of a blush flat ironing his face and making him turn crimson. What the hell was that even supposed to mean? Was he flirting back, or was he just trying to spare Keith further embarrassment. Probably the latter.

The guy probably dealt with people all day that were just as socially and touch deprived as he was. Definitely the latter.

Shiro has him move onto a hip rotation. He sets his foot up on one heel, bent at the knee. At an agonizingly slow pace, he moves his leg in the opposite direction of the knee bends. He rotates his hip, first to the right, outward toward Shiro and then to the left back towards the wall. These don’t hurt his hip as much, but they do make his ankle smart.

“Are these a little easier?” Shiro’s hand leaves his hip after he makes sure his form is correct and makes a few notes in his chart.

“Yes and no. My hip feels okay enough. The ankle though.”

“Yeah, it’s definitely an exercise that works both areas. Make sure you do these last two exercises at least three times a day in three sets of ten.”

“You got it doc.” So, maybe he wasn’t getting kicked out. That was good. Right?

Shiro has him do another set of knee bends, then it’s back to rotations. Finally, he says, “I think that’s all for today.”

“Oh thank god,” Keith replies. Immediately his lower body turns to jelly and he goes flat and boneless on the table. It’s embarrassing, being covered in sweat from literally just moving his leg around. What would it take to get the doctor to carry him out into the waiting room?

* * *

“Oh thank god,” Keith replies.

Shiro would have to agree. He’s seen plenty of patients pushed to their limits and covered in sweat after their session. Plenty of attractive ones at that. Seeing Keith like this shouldn’t affect him. At all. He’s always prided himself on being able to deliver excellent bedside manner, without letting these interactions affect him on a deeper, more personal level.

But he watches Keith lay there for a moment and recover from all the stress he’s just placed on his body. Watches the bob of his throat as he swallows. Watches him cover his eyes with his palm. Seeing a patient like this shouldn’t affect him, but it certainly does.

* * *

 

“You are NOT the father.” Pidge looks up from her chemistry book to the television. She watches the screen as a very distraught woman runs from the stage, to backstage. The camera follows her the whole way.

“You think this stuff is faked?” The woman who’d brought Keith in this morning asks. She’s sitting sideways in one of the chairs and has her long legs bent at the knee so that her feet can rest on another chair. It looks uncomfortable as hell, but Pidge can’t imagine what she’d do with such long legs if she had them.

She closes the chemistry book. Usually she’d hate the distraction. However, the opened conversation gave her an organic chance to do some digging. Who was this girl? Sister? Unlikely, they looked nothing alike. Girlfriend? Maybe. Wife? No way. Neither had rings. She’d heard Keith call her Martin, which only added to the mystery. No way that could be her real name, right?

“I mean, it would make me feel better, as a person who watches this garbage almost every morning if it were faked. I can’t imagine having this kind of personal stuff aired on daytime television. It seems exploitative.”

“But you love it,” the woman replies.

“Yeah,” Pidge admits.

“Me too,” she says.

The conversation dies for a moment, and each second there’s silence between them the harder it’s going to be to rekindle it.

“So your Dr. Shiro.  He into dudes or what?”

Oh, so she was going to wreck her carefully planned script and cut right to the chase. Pidge can’t decide if she loves her or hates her for it. “Um, I don’t think that’s my place to disclose.”

“Oh, well,” She turns back to the television. “I’m sure Keith would love to know.”

_Ding ding ding._

_Jackpot_

In an instant, Pidge decides she loves her.

 


	4. The five point plan

Unfortunately the world they lived in wasn’t black and white. There were lots of annoying shades of off white, taupe, and gray that fucked all of that up. Relentlessly.

So as much as Keith would have liked things to be black and white, because it would’ve made things so much easier. So when he gets the chance to draw those lines for himself, make decisions that pull something firmly into territory that is strictly, “black” or “white,” he does it firmly. Without regrets or second guesses.

In the morning and afternoon after his second session with Dr. Shirogane he makes a few decisions. First, he’s going to try to get into the doctor’s pants. He’s going to harness all of that energy that makes him persistent to the point of being stupidly blind with it into getting something he really wants .

Next, he’s decides that it’s going to fail. He doesn’t even know if the guy is into men. He’s probably the kind of nice guy that doesn’t want to date his patients and if he were, he probably sees better looking people than Keith all the time. In short, if you’re that hot and that nice why bother with a grease monkey? That’s going to be fine cause, it’s the only way he’s going to get it out of his system. He just might need to time it right so that his sessions don’t get weird when he strikes out.

Third, he’s going to find and murder the guy that hit him. Even though he doesn’t remember any of it and they only have Lance’s description of the car to go by, he’s as good as dead. He’d forced Martin to bring him into the shop today, because he was sick of sitting at home and letting his life get progressively shittier.

“I want to see Peaches.”

“I told you, you really do not man.” Lance stands in front of the tarp he knows his bike…or what’s left of it is under. “I know I should’ve gotten this done in the month you were gone, but give me a weekend to at least take away all the fucked up parts, or something. It’s only going to make you upset.”

“I’m constantly upset,” Keith fires back. “About the accident,” is implied.

“You know who’s great? Cherry Bomb.” His other bike, rarely taken out of storage for anything other than bike shows. It was an impulse buy after having the shop for almost two years. They’d finally gotten to a place where they could pay rent, keep the lights on, and somehow manage to turn a profit. Where Peaches was love combined with utility Cherry was pure impulse. “You should go out back, open up the storage unit, and just look at her with love. Have a nice little affair, and wait til I have the time to actually fix this for you.”

But he wasn’t in the mood for Lance’s bleeding heart bullshit. He threw the tarp back anyway.

When he finally saw what was left of Peaches, he let out an audible gasp. Her front wheel was all crunched up under the handle bars. The fender was mutilated. The rear wheel was all but bent in half from the car’s impact. The exhaust pipes were ripped up, and he could tell that her frame was shot to hell. Less damaged parts, like the gas tank may have been salvageable….But the custom red orange gradient paint job he’d put on the bike himself, her namesake, was ruined. 

His desire to kill was only augmented by the fact that Lance wouldn’t shut the fuck up. It started as soon as he and Martin had walked through the door. “What are you doing in today Keith? I thought you were supposed to be off for another few weeks. Dr’s orders.”

“I own half of this place,” he barks back. “I don’t have to explain myself, but I wanted to go over everything with Marty so you don’t have to…And make sure you were nice to her.”

“Nice? Keith…You’re telling me to be nice? That’s really rich,” It was amazing that after almost two decades of friendship, Keith can still hate him so much.

Lance continued on as Keith showed Marty the front. It consisted mainly of a counter with an extremely dirty telephone that Lance refused to answer because the handset was filthy, so her help was critical in this department. He also showed her how to print invoices and keep the books. “She’s going to be a distraction. Instead of getting work done we’ll be gossiping all day.” (probably true). Then, “It’s going to be distracting for me watching as strange deadbeats hit on her all day.”  Also probably true, but that already happened at Hunk’s. She could clearly hold her own.

Now that he’s done showing her what to do, and set her up working on a backlog of service reminders for regular customers, he’s set himself up at the Captain’s Chair.

The Captain’s Chair was a brown pleather oversized Lazy Boy that Keith was not at all ashamed to admit he’d pulled from the garbage. Lance is ashamed to admit that it’s a garbage chair, but that doesn’t stop him from wiping it down with a Clorox wipe and taking a catnap in it from time to time anyway.

“Okay, what do you need help with? Preferably something small,” Keith asks from the chair. Martin’s pulled up one of the taller work benches, with plenty of space underneath to his chest. She’s also got his basic repair kit laid out in front of him. It’s going to be a bit of a hassle if he has to get up to use the bathroom, but other than that, it seems like it’s going to be a manageable setup.

“Keith if you doubt my abilities to run the shop, I ask you to consider who has destroyed the place within thirty minutes of arrival.” Lance gestures to the disarray his corner of the workspace had been left in when Martin dragged the table over.

It was true. If Lance was overwhelmed, the current level of organization in the shop gave nothing away. He’s got three bikes in addition to Peaches in the shop. Two are in Keith’s bay, and the third is in his area. It looks like he’s in the middle of adding a mod kit.

 “Lance, if I don’t do something other than watch TV or go to my Doctor, I’m going to snap.”

“Fine,” Lance grumbles. “How do you feel about a carburetor rebuild?

“Like it’s the best thing in the word.”

“Oh my gawd,” Martin calls from the front room. The door in between the front office and rear work bay was rarely closed. “Speaking of him, you should see this doctor he has Lance.”

Great, he’d managed to get Lance to shut up and now she was going to start in.

“Hot stuff?” Lance asks, “Makes the idea of turning your head and cough sound not so bad?”

“He’s not even that kind of doctor dumbass.”

“But he’s beautiful,” Martin chimes.

Martin and Lance go back and forth for awhile. “The doctor is beautiful”

“The new bus boy at Hunks has given two of the other waitresses crabs.”

“Toni got into another fistfight. Cops got called. Mom had to bail her out.”

“I know I laughed for a good fifteen minutes about that one.”

Even breaking down the carburetor can’t quell the softly budding rage inside of him. He makes one final decision. Coming back to work was an awful idea. Tomorrow he was bringing earplugs to drown them out.

* * *

 Martin talked up Shiro so much that the two all but had a fistfight Thursday night over who would take him to the next appointment. It was super embarrassing because they were having dinner at Hunk’s plae before Martin’s shift. She’d actually had him down in a choke hold on the floor but Lance started _crying._ Martin promptly stopped, and in the end Lance won because he, “deserved to see this man if his beauty rivaled his own.”

They get to Shiro’s office at 8:07 because Lance has to stop and pick-up his dry cleaning, and no it can’t wait because it’s on the way to the clinic. If they get it on the way back, they’ll end up in the opposite direction of the shop. It makes Keith smolder with rage, because why the hell can’t it wait?

So when they do pull up late, and Shiro’s car isn’t in already in the parking lot, he feels a heave of disappointment pull at his chest.

“Shiro’s running late this morning,” Pidge says from behind her computer screen. “Something’s wrong with his car. I can get you started on a machine, or you can wait for Shiro.”

“I’ll wait for Shiro,” he responds a bit too quickly.

“Good choice,” Pidge says in return.  “I don’t know how long he’ll be, but it sounded like he wasn’t out of his driveway, and was getting a cab. Soon I guess.”

Shiro arrives at exactly 8:15. “Sorry I’m late Keith,” he says with a closed eye, open grinned apology. It’s snowing again, and his hair is covered in melted drops of snow. His black pea coat is dotted with hundreds of white flakes. What on Earth could this man ever have to be sorry about?

Keith follows him back into the treatment area. “It’s not a problem. We were late too.” He doesn’t hide the glare he shoots at Lance.

“It shouldn’t be a problem, I can have Pidge get started on my 9:00 AM client anyway. She’s been shadowing that patient for awhile now. Unless you have to leave right at nine?”

Keith nods. It seems to be the best response given he doesn’t exactly understand Pidge’s role here other than omnipresent staff and bad gum chewer. “No, it’s fine.”

Shiro leads him back into the treatment area. When the door closes behind them he asks, “How are you doing today Keith?”

Lance bought him a breakfast burrito that morning, ate it before he got to the house, and then had the nerve to tell him about it as if he’d actually done him a favor.  He hadn’t had any pain medication that morning because his doctor had told him to wean himself down over the next week. But he’s been back at the shop two days this week and in this time helped Lane make a (small) dent in the backlog. If he doesn’t think about Peaches, it’s quite an accomplishment.

“Good. I’m kind of sort of unofficially back at work now,” he says in a wavering tone. He doesn’t want to be scolded, but he’s not sure if he can feign anger if he is.

Instead Shiro’s expression remained neutral. Never mind the fact that Shiro’s neutral expression was fairly happy. “That’s good as long as you’re not over exerting yourself. Keeps depression at bay.”

Maybe anxiety too. The tingling, almost burning feeling in the tips of his fingers that screams at the back of his mind to do something, anything, is gone now that his body and mind are occupied.

“What is it that  you do for a living Keith?”

“I’m co-owner of Lion’s Head Repair and Customs.”

“Motorcycles?” Shiro’s eyes light up as if he’s putting pieces to an interpersonal puzzle together.

Keith wants to take a photo of that expression, frame it and cherish it. Instead, Keith settles for a nod. “I’ve been working on something pretty much every day since I was a kid. When stuff broke down at home, the washer or whatever…It was my job to fix it.” In an uncharacteristic turn, Keith wants to spill everything. He wants to tell Shiro about growing up with Lance, and filling in the big unsightly rust holes in Rosalind’s car with Bondo under Edith’s tutelage.

But he bites his tongue, because Shiro is the kind of guy that’s so nice he’s not going to tell you to shut up.  “So it feels good to be doing that again. If that makes sense.”

“That makes a lot of sense actually,” Shiro gestures him to the table, and they begin with the knee bends they practiced last time.

It was a stupid idea, but Keith can feel the words spilling out before he can stop himself. “In fact, Pidge mentioned that there was something wrong with your car?” In that moment Keith twists the throttle on his own heart and he can feel it skip a few beats into overdrive. “I can take a look at it for you if you want. I mean, if you don’t have a good mechanic. I mean, I specialize in motorcycles, but I can fix basically anything.” Christ, he’s rambling now. He must looks so pathetic leaning back on the table with his knee half in the air and his face beat fucking red.

“I couldn’t impose on you like that,” Shiro says.

But Keith can tell he’s considering. It wasn’t a no.

And in a city of this size a good mechanic was hard to come by. And even if you found one, there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t be carted off to jail after a year or so for possession or trafficking.

“Seriously, cars are not even a problem right now. Most stuff under the hood is right at my level.”

Shiro shoots him an unconvinced look.

“Except for all the crap on the undercarriage.” He rolls his eyes. Way to fucking go Keith. Way to make a guy think you’re competent. Let me take a look at it, I can at least tell you what the problem is. That way, you won’t get ripped off.”

Shiro’s face goes flat. It’s almost scary to see the absence of expression there. “Let me think about it.”

A comfortable silence settles over them after awhile Keith finishes his first set of repetitions. Like some kid begging his mom to go to a sleepover, he’s considering it a yes.

 “So are you more the custom side or the repair side?” Shiro asks after a few repetitions.

“Both,” he replies with his knee bent to his chest. His range of motion is about the same despite doing the reps at home as told. But, he was in a lot more pain today, going off of the pills and all. “But I like the customizing more. I do a lot of painting and airbrushing.”

“Airbrushing?” Shiro asks.

Keith can feel his hands on him again. But it’s becoming more natural as time progresses. They’re still heavy and warm, but he expects the contact.

“Yeah, like if you want a certain pattern or texture in the paint. I’m a sucker for gradient myself. I have this orange, pink red thing going on with P-my motor cycle.” Was Shiro the kind of guy that understood the complexities of naming a vehicle? He also withholds the fact that he’s won industry awards for the technique because that would be too boastful.

“If I come by with my car…For you to look at, will it be there? You know so I can see?”

Keith covers his eyes with his hands as Shiro extends the position of his knee closer to his chest.

“My bike is so fucked right now.” But damnit that meant Shiro was not just considering it, but _really_ considering it. This is where you keep the conversation going, you don’t just let it fizzle. Right? “Um, I have other examples you can see though. I have another bike.”

After awhile Shiro moves him over to the elliptical. It feels like he’s walking on sand, and getting up on it is a challenge. Shiro has to hold the machine steady. He also offers Keith his hand to steady his balance getting on. Keith’s not ashamed to take it.

Like everything else, Shiro explains what they’re going to do and why. In agonizing detail he goes over what muscle group this works, and how it’s going to help his gait. If it weren’t for the liquid velvet sound of Shiro’s voice, his eyes would gloss over every time he said, “fracture.” It breaks the conversation, and Keith’s usually not upset about it. The little mental breaks in between small talk is refreshing.

So he almost falls off the machine when Shiro picks it back up. “It would be kind of nice to see your bike. Get the nostalgia gears turning.” He ups the resistance on the machine, which is probably the only thing that keeps him on the machine. He has to grasp at the handles and hold on firm to adjust.

“Did you used to ride or something?”

“Yeah, when I was a kid my brother and I had dirt bikes. That doesn’t really count I know.”

“I think it counts. It’s what got me started on all of this…fourteen…maybe fifteen years ago.”

“Before I enlisted I had a motorcycle too. My dad hated it.”

Keith’s brain all but explodes, because how could one sentence make someone so much more attractive? Because suddenly Dr. Shirogane wasn’t just a pretty face and a soft voice anymore. He was a guy with a past, and interests, and there might be a few overlapping ones with his own.”

“What was it?”

“Hm? Oh the bike? I think it was a Honda…Hawk?”

“A SuperHawk?” Keith corrects. He emits a low whistle. “Rocket man huh?”

“More like my brother was going to med school and needed some money.”

“Not bad for a first bike,” Keith compliments. “Not bad at all.” He’s tempted to keep talking. Shiro’s previous statement revealed a lot more information, but he didn’t want to come off as weird. It was a fine balance. Being weird to push people away, and then masking the weirdness when you wanted to let someone get a bit closer. “Did you like, grow up in Japan or something?”

Shiro’s face is enveloped in confusion.

“Nobody calls it a Hawk over here. It was marketed as the SuperHawk in Japan and the Firestorm everywhere else.” Yeah, he might have fucked up a bit with that info dump.

Shiro’s expression shifts again. Like he wants to say something, but doesn’t. His expression has shifted back to the placid smile that Keith has grown so accustomed to, and that’s enough really. “Very perceptive,” he says with a chuckle. “For a few years when I was in high school.”

Keith furrows his brow for a moment and bears down on the elliptical handles. He tries to imagine Shiro riding though the too narrow streets of a large metropolitan area with 103 horse power underneath him. On a bike with a top speed of over 150 miles per hour.

He can’t do it.

Maybe he can’t imagine Shiro engaged in reckless behavior like weaving in and out of traffic…But if you’ve got something like a Hawk, how the hell are you gonna be responsible?

He stops entertaining the thought after about twenty minutes on the elliptical. His breath is coming out short, and his hip hurts. It takes every ounce of energy to get through the session.

Shiro’s soft encouragements certainly help. “Almost there,”

“You’ve got this,”

The man could be asking him to murder someone right now and he’d probably do it without second thought.

At the end of every appointment, Shiro walks him back out to the waiting area. Today, instead of opening the door and holding it open for him, Shiro lingers for a moment. “Do you have a preference on when I come by? I usually leave here around five.”

Suddenly all the pain evaporates from Keith’s body. Even the soreness in his hip from Shiro extending his leg and encouraging him to get a wider range of motion on the elliptical vanishes.

“Or I could come by tomorrow, but I don’t know if you’re open.”

“Will your car make it?”

“I think so. It starts and everything, but it’s making a weird noise. I didn’t want to risk it before work today.”

Keith furrows his brow for a moment in thought. He had to calculate this just right. Tomorrow offered less of a chance of privacy. It was a shorter day on Saturdays. They closed at two. Tonight was the standing tradition of going to Hunk’s. Martin was working, and Lance rarely went a Friday night without throwing a twenty down in the dart tournament. He hadn’t committed to going, but it was also assumed that he would go. There was also the, “dependent on everyone for rides,” factor.

“Um, I’d be okay with tonight. If you are.”

“Yeah, I’ll be by around six?”

“Great.”

Shiro leans over him to open the door.

“Wait. Do you have a pen?”

Shiro goes to the opposite side of the room and fishes one out of the drawer underneath the cabinet.

Keith fishes a crumpled receipt out of his pocket. “This is the address.”

* * *

“So what’s the seduction plan?” Lance asks as they climb into the Volvo after his Friday session. “Dude, his beauty doesn’t rival my own. He makes me look like garbage.” Keith had hoped he could strike the “rivaling his own,” line from his memory forever, but Lance apparently liked it. It was staying.

Keith didn’t exactly have a plan. He couldn’t just tell Lance that because he’d then feel compelled to “help” him formulate a plan. He couldn’t just bullshit one on the fly though. Shiro comes over. Keith fixes car. Magic happens. Right?

In the end, he just opts for the truth, because if Lance wants to try anything stupid, he’ll just shoot it down and then stab it in the back for good measure to make sure it’s dead. “I was gonna ask if he wanted get together sometime and fuck on like…my last day of treatment, but-”

“Seriously dude?”

“I don’t want my doctor to fire me… Do you even know how awful that would be?” Keith’s voice raises a bit in terror. He’s pretty good at being “weird” by now. Has had a lifetime to perfect it. He got his start as an brooding orphan. Then he transitioned gracefully into a dirty punk who got into fistfights, and progressed his way into knife fights. Then he got a bike and became a greasy punk who got into fistfights and knife fights. It all funneled quite nicely into the reserved weirdo he was today who drank cheap scotch straight while his best friend shot pool, and he stared off into the distance thinking about nothing in particular.

He was weird, but he refused to cross the threshold into bonafide creep. He didn’t have Lance’s charm to actively pursue someone, stay true to himself, and avoid the title at the same time.

“I’m gonna give you some insights into my patented five point system.” Lance smirks and turns the key and revs the ignition. Uncalled for. He’s in his mom’s old Volvo he paid 800 bucks for, not his work of art motorcycle. Lance then turns the radio off so he can hear in painful detail each word.

Although he’d never admit it, it might do him some good to take heed. Lance got laid…often.

“Alright my man, first you gotta go down to the Armani Exchange and get something fresh. Do not remove the tags. I mean under no circumstances will you remove the tags, because you will be returning that stuff the next day. It’s not cheap. Do not smoke while in the clothes. Also, I cannot go with you and help you pick something out because I am banned from most high end clothing stores in town for these practices.”

“Lance.”

“Next, when you see your doctor, say you have a Groupon to a nice restaurant in town that’s about to expire. This will show that you are both classy, and fugal but not cheap. You literally have to use them that night or else! Now, whether or not you have a Groupon for real…I don’t know nor do I care.”

“Lance,” he lights a cigarette and leans his head against the cracked window. The puffs of cold air are the only thing keeping him conscious right now.

“Dude if my mom smells that she’s gonna be so pissed.”

“It’s your car now. Just tell her it was me.”

“Whatever.” Lance sulks for a moment until the silence between them grows too thick and he can’t stand it. “Point three is taking them dancing. Show your sensual moves in a way that will suggest that they will transfer to the bedroom. Or a demonstration in the arts in general. We might have to skip that step for you. Unless he wants to watch you slap some tacky ass custom pinstripes on someone’s fuel tank.”

Keith scowls. People come from miles around for those “tacky ass pinstripes.”

“How will I ever manage?” Keith replies.

“Well,” Lance takes an overly wide right turn onto the highway. It catches Keith by surprise and he jerks with the movement. “Although difficult, I think you can make up for it in point four. You have to make a meaningful emotional connection.”

Keith opens his mouth to speak, but Lance interrupts. “I know. It sounds absolutely crazy. You, emotional. Just hear me out. You have a ton of material to go on. Orphaned at a young age, insane semi-adoptive family,” Lance raises is his eyebrows. “Excruciating personal injury. The possibilities are endless here because you know it’s contextual.”

Keith really doesn’t know. His blank stare response communicates that quite effectively.

“It’s contextual because the emotional connection you make is going to be different for each person. Duh. Anyway after that. Point five. Which seals the deal. Excessive foreplay.”

“That’s point five?” Keith asks in an unamused tone. He lights up another cigarette because Lance was giving him a headache. “How can having sex be part of your plan to have sex? It’s redundant.”

“Keith, Keith, Keith, Keith.” Lance makes a tisking noise by clicking his tongue against his front teeth and the roof of his mouth. “We’re not just talking BJ’s and HJ’s here Keith. You’re gonna have to eat some ass.”

“You act like I haven’t done that before.”

“My sources indicate that it might not be your fave.”

Keith hasn’t had a ‘relationship’ in yeas, and he hasn’t dragged anyone home from the bar. Lance’s “sources” were bullshit. “You have no sources.”

“Nevertheless, I rest my case. You are going to have to make some exceptions for this beautiful man Keith if you think you even have a cold chance in hell-“

 “By the way dumbass, you never let me finish.”

Lance hits the break, and he makes eye contact with Keith when he stops at the light.

“I didn’t have a plan, but I do now. I’m looking at his car tonight. So I need you and Martin to get out of the shop asap tonight.


	5. 90% Dirt and 10% Filter

“Well, well, well,” Pidge looks at him through glared lenses so he can’t see her eyes. Her mouth pulls into a smirk and she crosses her hands across her chest.

The scrutiny makes his face go ghost white, and he can feel the beginning of a cold sweat breaking out on his palms. There’s no reason a 22 year old half his size should hold this kind of power over him, but she does.

“There’s the face of a man who has made a mistake.” Her grin somehow goes wider. She gets up from the counter and approaches him. Stops when she’s only a few inches away from him. “But what kind of mistake could Dr. Shirogane make? Did he not help a little old lady cross the street this morning? Did he not separate his whites from his colors? Jay walking?” She shakes her head. “You’d never throw your laundry into the washer without sorting it first.”

Her breath smells like coffee, and she’s very clearly wearing the exact same thing she had on yesterday. They were going to have a talk about that. Professional dress was a thing, even if that meant they were excused from the suit and tie nonsense of other places of business. As soon as she was done terrorizing him. 

“Have you and the client,” She pokes at his chest. “Engaged in the most dangerous game?” She raises a single eyebrow.

“You know my policy on that Pidge,” he responds with an icy stare. Despite the ‘policy’ he did have to mentally convince himself that there was nothing wrong with having Keith look at his car, so long as he paid him for his time. The man was a professional mechanic. If he had to clarify the terms of the visit with Keith, or abandon the idea entirely, so be it.

Pidge gathers up the supplies needed to sterilize the exam area after a client. “I know your policy. I also know you’re human.”

* * *

Keith had intended on taking out some of the garbage in the repair bay and maybe combing his hair before Shiro stopped by the shop. He didn’t want to make it too obvious that he wanted the guy. Despite the pathetic near begging it took to get him into the shop, he did have weeks of therapy left after all…

But he did want to make a good impression.

Luckily all that got shot to hell when he fell asleep in the Captain’s chair around four to the sound of Lance doing some spot welding, and woke up at 5:45 to Lance telling him, “Later dude, and nothing weird on my side of the garage.” So he really had no time for any of that before Shiro arrived.

Quickly, he shoved the Chilton 1979-1982 Ford Lincoln Mercury manual up on a high shelf behind some Triumph and Harley manuals. Yes, he had to ask Lance to call his friend who was in the auto repair business to bring it over, and yes he did owe Lance a sizable favor now. But he wanted to actually be able to fix whatever was wrong with the car. There was no way he was letting Shiro go to some other mechanic after he actually got him in the shop.

Leg be damned.

It’s stupidly cold, but he opens the garage door in full anyway so Shiro can drive right in when he gets here.

At 6:00 right on the dot, Shiro pulls up if on cue.

“Hey,” Shiro says in a voice that’s soft to the point of being subdued.

For a moment, it’s comforting that Keith isn’t the only one who is maybe thinking this wasn’t the best idea, or at the very least is a little strange. “Hey Shiro,” he replies for a lack of anything better to say. He the part of his mind that’s modeled social interactions after Lance for the better part of his life wants to say something awful like, “I guess you’re not used to going where your clients work?” because he knows that would be an awful thing to say.

“Thanks for doing this. I really don’t have a reliable mechanic. I usually just take it to one of the auto repair chains around town.

Keith audibly scoffs. “Shouldn’t trust something like this with just anybody.” He lets his hand ghost against the glossy black paint on the hood before he rests the tips of his fore and middle finger on the silver window shaped hood ornament. “And those places will hire anybody…” his voice trails off before he reignites the conversation. “Before we do anything. Before you even pop the hood,” Keith strides over to the air compressor wedged against the bay wall between a hydraulic jack and an electric drill press. “You have got to add air to those tires. It’s making my blood pressure go up by the second.”

Over the abrasive humming noise of the compressor Shiro responds, “Now you know how I feel when patients come to my office on foot after a hip fracture.” He plucks the compressor hose from Keith’s hands and goes to remove the caps from the stems on each white walled tire.

Keith doesn’t bother to hide the smirk that inches its way from his mouth, pulls up his cheek, and presses into a dimple. “I want all of those at exactly 30 PSI.”

“Yes boss.”

He’s used to seeing Shiro in his element. Calm. Collected. In charge. When he sees Shiro in the office, he’s in a setting where he knows the answer to every possible question, and he’s competent enough to address those concerns, usually before they can even be voiced.

Shiro fumbles with the hose a few times trying to get the stem and the compressor attachment to line up properly. The first few times he probably lets more air out of his tire than he lets in. Then, seeing him check the pressure in each one. It’s like watching a small child do a task that’s relatively simple for an adult like tie their shoes or cut up their meat at a meal. He feels the warm sick combination of secondhand embarrassment and frustration slide upward from his stomach to his chest. He really wants to intervene.

Then again…Shiro is pretty, but a face like that doesn’t exempt you from abusing a car that beautiful. Maybe he’ll air up the tires in a month or so, if he has a chance in hell and Shiro hasn’t decided that he’s awful.

There are a lot of “ifs” in that statement.

Shiro finishes, and Keith turns off the compressor.

“Okay, I think my blood pressure is back to normal now. You can pop the hood if you want.”

Shiro opens the drivers’ side door, and Keith can hear the sharp _pop_ of the hood latch opening.

“Look, before you start, I want you to know that I intend to be billed like any other client,” Shiro says running his prosthetic hand through his undercut.

Keith scoots over a few steps, undoes the latch revealing the engine block fully, and lets out another low whistle. The second time he’s fawned over Shiro’s machinery today.

Still.

It’s stuff like this that makes him think that maybe he needs an actual car. Not the shitty weather. Not the injury. No, just big sexy V8 engines. He rests his crutch against the grill and turns toward Shiro, who is leaning against the open drivers side door.

“Yeah, of course. I don’t work for free. Start the engine.”

Shiro complies.

“Then again, I don’t really have a concrete billing system for cars,” he says mostly under his breath.

He can only assume that without the troublesome noise, it would sound something like his version of heaven. His eyes travel from the engine block, to the radiator, the fan, and the serpentine belt. The whole thing sounds like it needs a tune up.

It kind of makes sense that a guy who drives around with low tire would have that kind of problem.

“Turn it off,” Keith says.

He bents at the waist, steadies himself on the grill of the car and reaches downward. He pulls out an air filter that’s 90% dirt and 10% filter. “Well there’s part of the problem,” he waves the dirtied filter at Shiro. “They’re not supposed to look like that.”

“Oh,” Shiro says as if this is genuinely news to him.

“Might as well….” He reaches forward and fiddles near the engine until he unclasps and pulls forward an equally dirty fuel filter. “I’m guessing if anything, you need a tune up…And if it’s more than that, you still really need a tune up.”

Shiro nods. “Okay I-“

Keith interrupts. “I actually have a lot of the parts. A lot of Lance’s sisters went through a Lincoln Mercury phase so we have quite a few of the parts. They were shitboxes so we just sort of ordered a bunch of stuff and kept it around.”

Shiro laughs.

“It’s not funny, you’ve clearly never had to resuscitate a teenage girl’s first car from the brink of death like, six times because she can’t afford another shitbox.” Keith says it with a smile because Shiro doesn’t have to. He’s not as bad as a teenage girl, but he has a lot to learn. “ If we don’t have anything I’ll let you know.” And if they don’t have it he’s going to be pissed because he also asked Lance’s friend to drop off a few parts that they didn’t have around the shop.

Because injury has turned him into a sniveling little bitch.

Or if he listened to Lance, “Something like a nice person whose purest intention is dick.” Whatever.

“And before you say no, I refuse. I refuse to let you continue to abuse this beautiful creature. It needs me Shiro,” he says with a bit too much bravado even though he’s dead serious. “Plus, what I can’t reach I’m going to walk you through. “

Shiro’s face, rosy from the cold goes white. “Keith do you even know how long it’s been since-“

Keith waves his hand dismissively. “Come with me,” Keith grabs one crutch and gestures to a small alcove to the left of the repair bay. “Unless you wanna watch me climb up a step ladder.”

Shiro’s eyes go wide. He follow him without further question.

“I really appreciate this Keith. I don’t _mean_ to ignore this stuff, it just slips my mind.” He says in between grabbing the off white and blue boxes. He take the time to carefully match each part number on the box to the list Keith has given him.

Keith didn’t think it was humanly possible, but somehow with the blush back on his cheeks, and his nervous fidgeting (the list has been balled up in his fist and uncurled three times now) Shiro looks even cuter. It’s really not fair.

But maybe he understands now how his patients feel when he’s busted them for not doing their exercises properly or not following their general practitioner’s guidelines exactly.

Shiro puts the boxes on his work bench, and Keith makes quick work of opening all of the boxes and inspecting each part. He has to make sure each one is worthy of this lovely machine after all. “Okay,” he gestures to the Captain’s Chair. “For now, you can just sit and relax. The only stipulation is that you’ve got to talk to me. No fiddling with the phone or any of that bullshit.”

“I can help.”

“I’ll let you know when I need help.” God help him if he can’t get these goddamn filters in without the doctor’s help.

“So how long have you owned the shop?”

“Let’s see,” Keith takes a minute to think. He’s been doing the same thing for so long the years just kind of run together. “I got back when I was twenty…I’m twenty-seven now. Edith gave us a loan so….” Most of this was under his breath and he was glad. “Four years? We’d been fixing stuff for years, but we actually had to prove ourselves first. All that annoying stuff. Training, certification, actual job in the field.”

“It was the same for me,” Shiro responds. “Turns out I couldn’t just practice medicine because I felt like it.”

Keith cracks a smile, but his back is turned to Shiro. “So how long have you been practicing medicine legally doctor?”

“Two years?”

The new air filter slides in smooth like butter. Apparently fixing a car is just like riding a bike…or one of those other shitty analogies. It’s hard to forget.

Keith isn’t good at carrying a conversation. He doesn’t always pick up on natural follow-up questions. Usually because he doesn’t give a fuck. But Shiro said something that morning that he desperately wanted to follow up on. So, before he can stop himself, it’s spilling out of his mouth.

“You mentioned something this morning, about being enlisted?”

He’s no stranger to the experience, that out of body moment where someone who looks and sounds an awful lot like himself says something that’s really dumb, or really tactless, or both. So out of body Keith just hovers there for a moment, and watches flesh sack Keith stand there, awkwardly turned with a wider stance towards Shiro because he can’t pivot on his hip yet. He wants to slap himself.

“Yep,” Shiro responds. “I was supposed to do a typical enlistment. four active, four reserve. But then this happened.” He waves his prosthetic like it’s no big deal. “So it was more like three years and an honorable discharge.”

Maybe to him it isn’t a big deal. Keith decides that it isn’t, and therefore it’s not a big deal to him either.

“What branch?” Keith asks for lack of better follow up.

“Air force.”

Keith nods and before he can stop the words from tumbling out of his mouth they do. Probably because he’s already hanging out, out of body. “Marines.” He says softly before he gives the fuel filter a firm smack into place. Not everything is easy like air filters.

“Active or reserve?” Of course Shiro’s asking. He brought it up. Because he’s an idiot.

Keith debates asking Shiro to bring him a socket wrench. Although that would defeat the purpose of burying his face in the engine so he doesn’t have to make eye contact. He opts to lamely hop over to his toolkit and pull one out in the standard 5/8ths size.

“Reserve,” he says after he’s started ratcheting on a sparkplug. “General discharge.”

Shiro won’t ask a follow-up to that one. That’s impolite, and although he doesn’t know the other man well he knows enough. Shiro is never impolite.

But he’s not going to let it die either, because this is a great way to test and see if he’s wasting his goddamn time. “Despite my attempts to be discreet somebody asked, and somebody told.”

It goes silent between them for a moment. That can be an answer too.

After a long while Shiro responds. “Yeah, that was always one of my biggest fears.”

Oh. Wow. Oh. Okay. Keith almost chokes on his own spit in hearing Shiro’s response. He tries desperately to hide it like he’s clearing his throat. “At least it’s better now.”

“Yeah,” Shiro responds. “Doesn’t exactly make up for those that were affected.”

Despite the gravity of the situation, Keith can’t get Lance’s voice out of his head. “Point four. You have to make a meaningful emotional connection.” And that last thing he said before moving on to the incredibly redundant point five. “You’ve got lots of material to go on.”

Guess he did.

“Wasn’t cut out for it anyway,” Keith responds. There’s no venom in his voice. If he’d had this conversation seven years ago. Five. Even as little as two years ago, he would have. But it’s like lifetimes now. He ratchets another sparkplug loose, then a third, and a fourth, on and on until he finally has all of them out.

“I lied,” Keith admits. “You don’t have to help me on this, but you should at least know how to do this.”

In an instant Shiro joins him at the car. “This is a spark plug,” he holds up a pristine white new plug. When these things make sparks, fuel goes boom. Car goes.”

Shiro furrows his brow. Keith wonders for a moment just how obnoxious he’d have to be to really piss him off. “When you leave these guys in here for awhile, they get all corroded and gross,” he holds up an old plug for Shiro to see.

“This is like, the easiest thing you can do. You just put a little oil on the thread here.” Keith grabs an oil can and applies some to the thread. “Then thread it for a bit by hand,” he leans down and puts it in one of the front cylinder ports. “Then you ratchet it.” He grabs the tool and tightens the plug.

“I could do that,” Shiro says as he watches.

“Yep, which is good because I can’t bend and I have short arms. So knock yourself out.”  Keith takes a few steps away to light up a smoke, but doesn’t let the engine block leave his field of vision. “So doctor, war hero, do anything else amazing?”

“Not really,” Shiro says with a hum. “Did some consulting for awhile after I was discharged. I was just kind of floating for awhile. Lost. Then, I went to school. The rest is history.”

“Other way,” Keith corrects with a firm voice when he fumbles with the ratchet in hand.

“Oh, I worked at an arcade in high school. I guess that was okay.”

“Lance and did something similar one summer in high school. Mini golf and Skee ball. The kids pissed me off. Lance loved it though.”

“Lance was the guy that brought you in this morning?”

Keith’s chest swells up with pride. He can’t help it. He never imagined himself being able to teach anyone a goddamn thing. Maybe Shiro just happens to be a really good student. Either way, he’s got six of the eight plugs replaced.

“Yeah, he’s like my brother.”

“Hm,” Shiro says with a nod. “Leg’s not hurting right?”

Keith responds in something that’s more of a grunt than words. “Need to stand. Sat on my ass all day anyway.”

“Can’t argue with that logic,” Shiro says.

“Kay,” Keith says without removing the butt from his mouth. He moves back over to his work bench and opens the drawer for specialty tools. He emerges with an s-belt wrench. “Last big thing. That serpentine belt has got to go. Lucky it hasn’t snapped in half before now.”

Shiro’s a goddamn natural. He’s got the belt wrenched off in minutes, and before either of them know it they’ve got it fed through to all the pulleys. It’s amazing.

“That should be that,” Keith says with a sharp exhale. “Under one condition. I don’t care how many years out into the future it is. I get to work on this car…Unless you start doing it. But I want a full report if that’s the case.”

“I think I can manage that,” Shiro responds. “But you’re forgetting something.

Keith cocks his head in response.

“I wanted to see you bike.”

“Oh!” Keith’s eyes go wide. He can talk about his toys for forever, but when someone’s legitimately interested…It’s like Christmas, and his birthday, and the day he moved into the same cramped bedroom with Lance and Martin all rolled into one. “Well you can’t see Peaches. She’s still in recovery. Like real bad.”

“Peaches.” Shiro says in a flat tone

“Yeah,” Keith says in an equally flat tone. He doesn’t have time for people who don’t understand. Peaches is Peaches. Nothing else to it.

“That’s a cute name.”

Now Keith feels the opposite. He has no time for people who just casually throw around the word cute.

They walk past Lance’s bay, his work bench is well organized, but something catches Shiro’s eye. He’s got ugly neon colored Kaiju toys lined up against the back of his bench. Many of them are worse for the wear. They’re covered in dirt, or have had their limbs blown off by fire crackers. Not many toys could survive the McClain children. But Lance claims their presence makes slow days faster. He’s got Godzilla, and Gamera, and Mecha Godzilla.

“No Mothra?” Shiro asks.

“Mothra got melted to pieces when Lance’s mom left out a lighter. We also set a trashcan on fire. Not our best day.”

Shiro nodded as if he were taking in every burn and pockmark on the remaining toys.

“I don’t really mind Mothra’s absence. Lance was always the Sci-Fi nerd.”

“What did you like then?”

“Cartoons mostly. Hong Kong Phooey. That stupid shark.” Keith walks over to where he’s got Cherry Bomb parked. Like it or not Lance was right, he needed something nice to look at while Peaches was laid up. “Shiro, forget about the kid stuff.” He pulls the cover off and hopes it’s dramatic enough. She deserves it cause it’s her time to shine. “This is Cherry Bomb.”

Keith reveals the bright red R1. Although he just looked at her this afternoon, it feels like he’s falling in love all over again…Or for the first time because she’s never been able to hold a candle to Peaches til now.

Now it’s Shiro’s turn to let out a low appreciative whistle.

“I’m secretly a rocket man Doc. I mean I love all the retro stuff. Peaches is older than me…But sometimes you just have to go really really fast.

“It’s very nice,” Shiro says. He puts his hand out as if he’d like to touch it but doesn’t quite know how.

“You can start it if you want,” Keith says before he can catch himself. Because no. Serious boyfriends don’t even get to start the bikes. So cute prospects…Definitely do not.

“That’s okay. I think tonight proved I can’t be trusted around nice machines.”

“Good point,” Keith breathes a small sigh of relief. “I’ll bring it round when I have the range of motion to actually get it started.

“I’d like that.”

They walk back to the car together. Although it’s only a few steps, Shiro matches his agonizingly slow pace.

“Start her up. Need to see if that was really the problem,” Keith says.

Shiro opens the door and starts the engine. It thunders to life with a powerful roar. All the cylinders are firing just as they should. Keith was right, it really does sound like heaven.

The sound of the car does something to him. Maybe he’s been stationary for too long. Hasn’t touched the road in so long he wants to do something really reckless. Maybe he’s sick of doing his little exercises every day, and feeling nothing else but useless otherwise.

For the first time in his life he legitimately wanted to play it safe. Maybe it was because he wanted to enjoy Shiro for the duration of his treatment. Maybe he was just afraid of rejection. But the purr of that engine (he’s blaming it on the engine) makes him want to do something stupid.

Shiro’s digging in his wallet like he’s going to pay him. And that makes him want to do something stupid too. He doesn’t work for free, but he basically made Shiro do most of the work.

“How much?” he asks thumbing a few twenties.

“I take payments in the form of lunch…or dinner dates,” he fires back.

Shiro’s expression darkens, and Keith knows he’s fucked up. The guy probably has patients fawn over him all the time, and he’s probably made Shiro feel like an ass for stepping out of his comfort zone and coming over.

“I don’t date patients,” is all he says in response.

“Fair,” Keith responds.

Before tension can build between them, Shiro fills in the gap because he’s Shiro and he’s increasingly convinced that he’s perfect. “You’re great Keith, but nobody is worth losing my license for.”

Keith nods. At this point he wants to unfuck the situation in any way possible. “Totally understand that.” He swallows a rough lump in his throat. He’s spent a lifetime trying not to weird people out. He’d hoped that after so long he’d be able to perfect it.  

Shiros face goes from dark, to flat, to an expression he can’t place. Mildly annoyed? Regretful? “But here’s the thing about your condition,” Shiro says with a look designed to melt. His eyes are set on trapping Keith’s. Once Shiro has his gaze he doesn’t let go. “Your condition is temporary.”

“So…I…won’t be your patient for forever…” Keith croaks out not sure if it’s a question, or a statement, or if he’s missing cues he desperately needs right now. Keith closes his eyes and tenses as he talks, but he knows it’s not going to be enough to soften the blow.

“Correct.” Shiro says with a smile.

“So, you’re not going to...fire me as your patient?”

“Seems excessive.”

“Yeah.” Keith stands there for a moment. His face is hot, and everything seems kind of blurry. If his leg weren’t aching, he’d be certain this was a dream. It’s like one of his out of body, foot in mouth experiences…But this time it went better than expected. There has to be other things in his life that haven’t crashed and burned horribly other than this, but he can’t think of any now.

“Seriously though, I have to pay you for parts,” Shiro says going back to his wallet. “You have to give me a number or I’m just going to start throwing twenties at you Keith.”

“Oh yeah, um…” Keith clears his throat. “One hundred should cover the parts.”

Shiro pulls a few bills out of his pocket and presses them into Keith’s palm. “Thank you.”

Keith opens the big bay door again, and watches Shiro back out. They wave lamely at each other as he leaves.

After the door closes, he lights up another cigarette, and gives it a few drags. He pumps the air a few times with his fist, not caring that his crutch falls to the ground.

Never before has vague felt so good.


	6. The Addendum

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Co-PI = co principle investigator in research

“I can’t believe you skipped steps one through three,” Lance punctuates the sentence with a slight hiccup, indicating that he’s teetering on the precipice between sober and smashed. Like most things with Lance, it was all or nothing.

Keith scowls as he shoves a wad of ones back into his wallet. It’s been awhile since he’s taken a cab somewhere, and forgot how much sticker shock was involved with reading the meter upon arriving at the destination. “I think it would’ve been stupid to wear new clothes to work on a car.”

Lance crinkles his nose at the other man and downs the beer in his hand. “So, anything other than stage four? Stage five maybe?”

“He doesn’t date patients.”

Lance opens his mouth. He’s pleased when hiccups come out instead of words, because he doesn’t think he can handle too many Lance-isms tonight. Especially when he’s in such a good mood.

“But, his words were, and I’m not making this up. “You’re not going to be a patient forever.”

At that, Lance’s eyes go wide. He sticks his hand up for Keith to high five, and Keith makes contact immediately, despite the choir of awful hiccup noises Lance is making.

“Lance, do the thing,” he shoves his glass of water towards him.

“No” _hic_ “Way”, Lance replies.

“Don’t be stupid about it. No one will even notice,” The only thing more pathetic than listening to Lance drone on endlessly, was watching him with a furrowed brow and a red face suffering because he wanted to look cool.

“Fine,” Lance says with a frustrated sigh. He gets up from the booth, bends at the waist, and holds the glass of water to his lips like he’s drinking it upside down. After a long draught he comes back up for air. It’s a Rosalind McClain trick that’s as old as time, and has gotten dozens of kids to stop hiccupping.

“Better Baby?” Keith says, repeating a phrase they’d both heard endlessly in their childhood. Have a splinter removed, “Better Baby?” get stitches put in, “Better Baby?” He wouldn’t be surprised if he got stabbed in the back someday, and Rosalind pulled the knife out and asked him, “Better Baby?”

Lance’s expression sours. Keith swears that over the chatter of the bar he can hear Lance mumble something like, “uncool,” under his breath. Lance will always be horrified by the action and the accompanying phrase. His mother made him do the upside-down water trick in front of his senior prom date. She of course asked her baby if he was better afterward.

The hiccups are gone, and Keith immediately regrets his decision to force Lance to cure his condition. “So, now that you’ve used your trump card this early in the game,” Lance says with a combination smile and leer that makes the hair rise on the back of his arms. “And you’re ditching the five point system,” this was bad. It meant that Lance already had something in mind and wasn’t going to drop it. “What’s your next move going to be? Invite him over to your apartment so you can watch Food Network for four hours, and then not cook him anything?”

“What else do you like to do?” Lance asks, in between trying to hail a waitress for another drink. The place is starting to get stupid packed, and he’d be better off shoving his way up to the rails. “You guys could sit together on the floor of your bedroom and listen to Cat Stevens records while you whittle.”

Keith kicks him under the table with his good foot. “You’re just stringing shit together that I don’t hate doing!” After a moment he adds, “I didn’t even think about doing anything else with him. He says he doesn’t date patients.”

“Keith, you are so dense it hurts.”

Keith has to physically ground himself by grasping the ends of the table until his knuckles are white in order to keep himself from taking this already awful conversation and making it worse. Cause yeah, he’s the dense one.

“Guys hanging out, who like each other,  and have the intent to have sex…That’s dating.” Lance rises again from his perch at the booth. He leans over the table and plucks Keith’s cigarettes from his pocket. Indicator two that Lance is well on his way to becoming the worst. “Two guys hanging out who like each other….Those are,” he sucks in air and lets the word roll off his tongue slowly so that it’s dripping in sarcasm, “friends.”

“But you hang out, become friends, and then when you’re all healed you can have this really great emotional sex with someone you actually know, and like.”

Keith takes a brief mental inventory of his most recent conquests. One night stand, one night stand, and a very heated bike week spent with a guy from the other side of the country. That last one wasn’t a one night stand, but he also didn’t remember his name. Lance might be making a point.

Lance finally realizes that he’s not going to have any luck with the waitresses. Or, he’s finally noticed the guy at the pool table whose got an ostentatious rainbow armband wrapped around the sleee his leather jacket. Lance gets up from the table, takes a few steps from the bar, and then deviates to the left, toward the pool table.

Ah. It was the latter. Keith clenches his jaw. 

Watching Lance approach other people has become something that’s painful on two fronts.

First, he’s gonna strike out. Keith can already tell because despite what he says, he’s not over his ex. Also, the hiccups are back. He can’t hear over the chatter of the bar, but he can tell by the way that Lance keeps covering his mouth. It looks like he’s going for the ‘let me show you a trick shot,’ line, which only has a 50% success rate.

The guy’s not going for it.

So then came the second prong.

Lance tended to date people who always needed help with the electric bill just this once, but had no qualms with asking the guy they just met for help. Lance dated people with lots of previous evictions, so they tended to stay the first night and linger. Regardless of whether or not they actually liked him.

Lance was giving to a fault, and was so often used against him.

So seeing Lance strike out meant he didn’t have to watch Lance’s pain intensify over time when he realized he was being used.  It was like a rush of relief followed by the cold hard smack of insensitivity.

* * *

On Saturday, Lance isn’t feeling great, so he doesn’t make it into the shop til noon. Which is super helpful because they close at 2:00. On Sunday he goes with Lance to visit the parents.

Rosalind tells him he needs a haircut, and insists that she do it.

And of all the McClain children, he’s the only one that still says yes. He gets the patented Rosie mullet, complete with uneven bangs.

But it makes her smile.

And all too quickly Monday comes again.

This time he drops Lance off at the shop and takes the Volvo.

After turning off the ignition he lets his arms and shoulders droop over the wheel for awhile. All things considered, things ended pretty well on Friday night. They wouldn’t be weird today would they? Then again Shiro seems to be the kind of cotton candy sweet person that wouldn’t do that.

“Morning Keith,” Shiro says as he walks into the clinic.

“Morning Shiro….Pidge,” he says as he surveys the scene before him. There’s an open bottle of club soda on the receptionists desk, and Shiro has Pidge by the shirttails. His jaw is clenched tight, his brows are knit. It’s the closest thing he’s seen the man to being pissed off. 

His hand dabs at an ugly ink black spot on Pidge’s shirt. “If you just wipe it around, you’re going to make it worse.”

“Ohhhh,” She says as she takes the cloth from his hand.

“You’ve got this?”

“Yeah. Thanks Mr. Clean.”

“Okay, we can start then Keith.”

“I think I need more paper towels,” Pidge says offhandedly. She brushes past Keith and in the process knocks over the opened bottle of club soda. “Oh, Damnit….”

Okay _that_ might be the closest thing to angry he’s ever seen Shiro.

“Now I really need more paper towels.”

Shiro purses his lips together, and then relaxes his expression. “Let’s just go.”

 “Car still working okay?”

“Feels like it’s floating,” Shiro says.

Keith expected a few more minuts of back and forth: how the weekend was, whether or not he was in pain Small talk felt like a pain with everyone. Even Lance. Shiro could probably say something like, “nice weather we’re having,” and he’d give a genuine response without feeling taxed or overexerted.

But there’s none of that today.  

Keith thought that maybe the vague agreement between them would ease up the guilt he felt whenever he stared at Shiro for too long. Instead it makes him feel worse. His intentions hung awkwardly out in the open like an exposed wound, and Shiro had to ignore it. Had to ignore it, and had to contain his own version of whatever it was he might’ve been feeling.

“Today we’re going to start with the TENS unit. It sounds terrifying. It uses electric current to stimulate nerves. In reality it just makes them flex. It doesn’t hurt and helps get muscles that have atrophied during your time in the hospital.

“I think I used one of these in the hospital,” Keith comments offhandedly while he’s rolling up his pants. 

Shiro unwraps a fresh set of pads and attaches them to the electrodes.

“And Lance definitely bought a cheap version of one of these off of an infomercial when he was drunk one night a few years ago. It like, came in a belt and claimed to shred your abs in minutes.”

Shiro chuckles. “Yeah, that’s definitely not going to happen with something like this.”

“It was funny though,” Keith responds. “He’d wear it under his clothes all day and get pissed when he didn’t even feel like he’d had a workout.”

“What is that again, cognitive dissonance?” Shiro asks in a tone that indicates it’s rhetorical…but he can’t quite tell.

“Can I ask what that was all about earlier?” Keith asks after a moment. He can feel he muscles around his ankle and up his calf restrict and contract, restrict and contract over and over again under the near silent hum of the machine.

The exercises usually provide proper pause between their conversations. The atmosphere is different today without them. He’s gotten used to Shiro’s soft instruction acting as a break from his own racing thoughts.  

“Pidge’s ink pen exploded all over her. That’s what happens when you gnaw on them.”

 “I mean…you seem off.”

Oh fuck. Shiro wouldn’t make it awkward, but he forgot one important little detail. He would.

* * *

 

Shiro’s life was defined by a few moments that lasted no more than a few seconds, and had lifelong repercussions. In memory, they become stretched and elongated to the point they become indistinct, but he knows for a fact that they’re mistakes.

The moment his feet leave the chopper and hit the ground.

When he signs his name on the consent form for the clinical trial.  

Standing in Keith’s shop and telling him he wouldn’t be a patient forever. Or maybe it started even a few days before when he stared at Keith, red faced and exhausted on the table, for a bit too long.

It was bound to happen eventually. It took Ryu all of three weeks of doing rotations during his residency. Matt was on his first clinical trial as Co-PI. The stubbornness mixed with a legitimate desire to improve, the genuine passion he has for what he does, the ability to be blunt despite their defined roles as patient and provider… Maybe he was lucky he’d gotten two years into his practice before something like this happened.

“Hey,” Keith asks says a moment.

He’s kicking his decision to use the TENS unit at the beginning of the session before he’s had the chance to clear the air. He feels like he should be doing something with his hands in between repetitions.

“I don’t expect anything from you,” Keith says. He opens his mouth for a moment as if he wants to say more, but pauses, crinkles his brow, and closes it again. Keith breaks their shared gaze and then nods softly to himself, as if deciding that what he’s said is enough.

“I appreciate it that Keith,” and he does because it feels like a huge weight has been lifted off his shoulders. Like he’s free to do the basic functions of his job with Keith again. “I don’t expect anything of you either.”

“You might find that I’m awful after a few weeks anyway.” Keith watches the muscles around his ankle constrict under the pads for a moment. “Any restrictions on being friends with your patients?”

“I guess not,” he’s never really thought about it before. He doesn’t hate the idea. Especially since most of his social life is divided between Pidge and his landlord anyway.

“Alright then, weirdness eradicated. We’re friends, and as your friend I worked on your car. And as my friend, you’re going to realize how uncomfortable I am just watching my muscles do stuff without moving at all and let me do something else.”

At that Shiro has to chuckle. He’s never heard that reason before. Usually patients don’t like the unnatural feeling of certain muscles constricting without the others. He turns of the device and starts to unhook the pads from Keith’s skin. He gestures to the exercise equipment. “Take your pick,”

“Friends don’t stab each other in the back,” Keith says in between huffs as he tries to keep up with resistance Shiro set on the stationary bike. “Literally or metaphorically.”   The bike makes a little clicking noise with each rotation of the pedals, and he finds the white noise soothing. Sure, it doesn’t compare to the constant sound of the air compressor or the beat of a well timed engine, but it’s something to drown out the constant stream of thoughts that trickle through his mind.

“Friends don’t hold hands,” Shiro supplies.

He’s significantly worse at this little game of “friends do, and friends don’t”. Seems like Shiro’s legitimately trying to create boundaries while he’s just sort of gradually trying to ramp up the ridiculous factor.

“Friends don’t punch each other in the face, unless if they’re really upset,” he says in a matter of fact tone.

“Friends don’t sit too close to each other…Even on public transportation and there’s a stranger on the other side.”

Keith says with a huff. “That’s unfortunate. I hate sitting next to strangers.”

“You can add an addendum. Friends don’t sit too close to each other, and in the event of a stranger sitting too close to them they can opt to have the friend stand up.”

“An addendum?” Keith shakes his head from side to side. “Doc, I barely made it out of high school. You cannot just drop words like that without warning.”

“Then we’ll add an addendum about the use of the word addendum,” and Shiro smiles like he’s said the funniest thing in the world and not something that just barely passes for humor. The expression still makes him want to melt, and he has the feeling this was going to be a difficult friendship.

“Friends do have to deal with each others’ awful sense of humor.”

“Or accept that their friends don’t have any sense of humor at all.” Keith’s jaw goes slack in surprise. He’s had a lifetime of taking this kind of shit from Lance, and Martin, and all the other siblings, but this is just too much.

“Oh, this one is important,” Shiro says as he writes a few things down on his chart. “No misinterpreting any contact. Although that might be more of a professional boundary.”

“Noted,” he tries to choke out as he fights against the machine’s pull, but it comes out more like a pathetic grunt than anything else. “So any more boundaries?”

“Keep your foot straight on the pedal,” Shiro comments offhandedly. “The goal of this is to strengthen the hip, while not causing any more damage.”

“Right,” Keith grunts again as he adjusts his foot. “Really, anything else besides the obvious?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he says as he observes Keith’s form on the bike. “Sit up straight, helps the core that way.”

Keith’s spine snaps into place, he’s been conditioned for years to respond to the phrase by Edith.

Shiro moves to the elliptical next to Keith. “Do you mind?”

“No,” Keith replies. It might make him feel better actually, instead of have Shiro watching him intently.

“So now that all that’s out of the way,” Shiro says. “And we’re friends, I can ask you what’s going on with Peaches.”

He wants to fucking die when he says Peaches. That’s what’s going on.

“I don’t fucking know,” Keith admits with a sigh. “I have the money to ‘fix’ her…but like at that point it’s not eve her anymore. It’s basically a new bike completely,” he tries to keep his tone neutral as possible, but he can’t and some of the white hot frustration he’s been bottling up for weeks now comes seeping out.

“Like I’ve had that bike for a really long time. I bought it when I first got back and I was still crashing on Lance’s couch.” And he realizes that none of these details make any sense to Shiro, but they just keep spilling out.  Like we hadn’t even moved into that apartment on 3rd, and he was still living with that girl. I mean I guess I shouldn’t be so attached to a thing, but I am.”

“I think I have a vague understanding of what you’re going through,” Shiro responds. “Maybe not on the same scale, but I did have this charm my mom got for me at a shrine. I had it with me from the day I left for college, all the way through my time in the service, the accident, my recovery. I didn’t have like a huge connection with it, but it was there. One day I sent it through the washing machine and it disintegrated.”

Keith stills on the machine as he listens. “What did you do?”

Shiro shoots him a look. He’s squinting slightly as if he’s sizing him up, seeing if he can really be trusted. Lance does the same thing whenever he’s about to tell Keith something embarrassing. “Honestly, I cried for awhile. When we’re vulnerable, it’s the things that are consistent that get us through. No matter how small.”

“Never considered it,” Keith replies, because he hasn’t. He doesn’t feel vulnerable right now, just pissed that he has to depend on people for rides, and people are constantly giving him their input on what he should and shouldn’t be doing, and…oh. Maybe he is vulnerable right now.

It’s a little after nine. Their session is going to be over soon, but he wants to stay and for the first time it’s not because he’s thinking with his dick. He wants to ask Shiro more about his arm. More about how he got through it all…And maybe he should tell him that because they’re friends now right?

As if he’s reading his mind, Shiro says, “If you want to talk about it more, we can sometime,” in a voice that’s so soft it’s barely audible.   

Keith swallows the lump that’s built in his throat. He’s never dealt with this kind of thing well. Admitting that he’s vulnerable makes him want to smash something. Or weld something. Or smash something and then weld it into something new. “I’d like that,” he says finally.

* * *

 

“Shiro!” He’s halfway up the steps to his apartment when he sees a mop of blue white hair poke out of the door. “Coming home for lunch?” She pushes her hair away from her face and his eyes meet her big blue ones.

“Something like that Allura.” In reality, he has to get Pidge something else to wear. It just makes sense for him to pick her up a shirt instead of her riding the bus all the way back to her apartment and then all the way back to the office. He also needs to drop off rent, so Allura’s timing is apt. “What would it take for me to convince you to have tea with your landlady? For old times’ sake?”

It has been a long time…He backtracks down the heavy iron stairs. “Okay, but let me go upstairs and get my checkbook. It is the first.”

She laughs and waves her hand. “I’m sure you’ll get to it.”

“Seriously. I’m getting it now before I forget and you send me an eviction notice.

For a landlord, Allura was pretty great. She hadn’t raised rent in years, and she always had things fixed in a timely manner, even if that meant dealing with her eccentric uncle in order to get things repaired. She grew the prettiest flowers in the spring, and never minded when he played records a bit too loudly.

No to mention the house itself was gorgeous. Alfor manor had been in their family for over 150 years. After her parents passed, she’d spent years restoring as much of the original interior as she could, and filled it with period appropriate furniture. The top floor, had long been sectioned off into two a separate dwelling areas. Her uncle lived in one side, and then she decided to take in a boarder.

She said that it, “Made things a bit more interesting around here.”

So Shiro had half of the top floor of a mansion to himself. It probably wasn’t what his mother had in mind when she told him to move out of the bachelor pad after graduation, but he liked it. He liked it far better than the upscale condos down town that were half the size and twice the rent. He also liked it better than buying a cookie cutter home out in the burbs.

So, Allura was great. The house was great too, but sitting in her apartment always made him feel uneasy. It was like walking into an antique store, or a doll house, or better yet an antique dollhouse. Everything was placed too closely together, and everything was too damn expensive.  He felt like if he moved too quickly he was going to knock something off of a shelf or display case. Probably something porcelain or glass.

Currently, he’s seated on one of her big burgundy armchairs. It’s made of a thick brocade fabric, and he’s afraid he can feel it buckle under his weight. In response, he sits gingerly on the seat, his back ramrod straight and his bottom barely making contact with the chair.

There’s also the issue of the carpet. He wasn’t asked to remove his shoes, but he feels like he should’ve. It’s snowing outside, and they must be covered in slush and salt. He feels the hot pangs of guilt as he looks at his shoes rest on the bright blue and red Ottoman rug.

She’s clearly taken up residence for the afternoon on the matching sofa. There’s a book laying open and face down across one cushion, and a blanket and her open laptop across the other. The cushions are thin like they’re barely padded. It hardly looks comfortable. It’s upholstered with the same kind of dense brocade fabric, and the frame is made of deep stained cherry wood.

It’s not all discomfort though. From here she has a great view out the big bay windows onto the street. The snow is falling softly outside, and he feels like he’s on the inside of a snow globe. If he looks up he can also see the chandelier that resides in the hallway. Each big copper end holds a candle that’s just begging to be lit.

“Cream and sugar Shiro?”

“Just cream please.” Oh yes, tea. He was going to have to consume a beverage perched like this. Allura approaches him and sets a paper thin ceramic cup on an equally thin saucer. She leaves, then returns a moment later with one of her own. Both china cups are decorated with asymmetrical hand painted roses.  He need to make sure he gave himself a moment to calm down before he inevitably broke the cup between his fingers due to nerves.

“To what do I owe the pleasure Allura?”

“No specific occasion,” she giggles from behind her cup. “You seem to be working later these days. I thought perhaps you needed a break,” she pauses for a moment.

“So you did want to make sure I made rent on time.” He hands her the check with a soft chuckle. Its funny because considering how low the rent was, and how it was no secret that she was an heiress. She didn’t _need_ the money.  

“No Shiro, I’m serious. I haven’t seen you in weeks.”

It has been very busy. Pidge has to leave early on Tuesdays and Thursdays for a class. That means I have a lot more filing to do at the end of the day.”

“I see,” she sips her tea and then sets it on a nearby end table. It’s made of a dark mahogany wood and inlayed with lighter wood pieces.

Shiro would never sit something on it so casually. In fact he’d probably try to put all of it, table cup, and saucer as far away from his reach as possible.

“I lied,” her face lights up for a moment and she grins from ear to ear. “I wanted to give you something.”

She gets up again and shuffles into the next room. She comes back with a thick hardbound book. “It’s been printed Shiro! And I know you have things to do and this is wildly selfish of me, but I just couldn’t wait any longer.” She thrusts the book into his hands.

Shiro looks down at the cover. The title reads, “A Bouquet of Magnetic Roses.” The illustration on the cover is of a rose redrawn to look like blueprints. Embossed at the bottom it reads, “Allura Alfor.”

“Allura!” Shiro stands up to give his landlady a hug. “This is amazing. It’s been such a long time coming.” But there isn’t exactly a rush when you are an heiress and have properties about town to manage. “I’m sure it will win a Hugo Award.”

“Then you’ll attend the launch party in a few weeks?” She asks hopefully.

“Of course.” 

* * *

 


	7. Keith Doesn't "Get" Coffee

At the end of his Friday appointment, after the resistance bands, the floor exercise, and the TENS,  Shiro asks if he wants to go for coffee. Apparently, much like everything else, Shiro was being genuine about talking about what Keith was going through.

There are just two problems with that. Keith, despite saying that he wanted to talk with Shiro more, has spent the better part of almost three decades repressing the shit out of any kind of emotion that he can’t immediately transfer into raw energy and immediate action. The second problem, is that Keith doesn’t “get” coffee. He waits for the dark sludge like liquid to slide out from the abused Mr. Coffee that resides in the front room of the shop and calls it that.

So he thinks about simply saying something like, “I don’t get coffee,” but then he realizes that Shiro would suggest somewhere else, and where else would he want to go? Hell, the only places he goes to regularly is Hunk’s place for booze and food.  For the times that he doesn’t want to see anyone…Well,  he’s pretty well acquainted with the delivery drivers for Jade’s Garden Chinese takeout.

He’s pretty sure Jade isn’t a real person.

But that’s beside the point. He needs to quench all of the uncertainty and say something.

“But I’m open to suggestion,” Shiro supplies after he spends a bit too long brooding over two pronged disaster that is this current conversation.

“Coffee’s fine,” he says for a lack of a better idea.

* * *

 

“You know, this isn’t exactly what I thought you had in mind,” Keith says as Shiro parks the car. He’d imagined walking into some hole in the wall coffee shop with “local art” created by art school dropouts tacked to the wall. He imagined Shiro being there long before him. He’d have a laptop out doing work, or a book, or a newspaper.

What he got was the riverfront pier. The pier is dead this time of year because, well…nobody wants to go boating in late February.  The smell of murky river water is thick on his tongue, and the only thing that tarnishes the view of the choppy black gray water is a single barge. Silently it soldiers on towards it’s destination against the current.

So he wants to pinch his cheeks, or maybe Shiro’s cheeks and make sure he’s not dreaming when he drives them out to the pier.  Shiro thrusts a thermos lid full of stale black coffee into his hands….Just to make sure he’s not dreaming. He almost jumps into the icy cold water to make sure he’s not dreaming when Shiro pulls a small steel flask from somewhere inside his coat and pours some of the content into the thermos.

“Still on medication?” he asks as his hand and the flask hover over the thermos lid he has perched between his hands.

“Only after sessions.”

“Say when,” Shiro says with a smirk.

And when Shiro lifts the angle of his wrist slightly emptying more of the thick amber colored liquid, he finally speaks, “When.”

Neither of them speak for a while after that. Keith lets his elbows rest against the rough wood edges of the pier. He stares off into the snow covered banks while he drinks his coffee. Has to do it quickly before it goes cold. He wishes he could’ve driven them down here on the bike. Let their faces get so cold and so numb on from the river front air that it would blow into the back of their noses and make them forget that they had brains.  

Shiro stands a safe distance away from Keith, his back pressed to the pier. He faces the riverfront. There are all kinds of outdoor art pieces designed to withhold the harsh winters, as well as memorials for wars that no one remembers. Keith thinks it’s the shittier view by far.

But he’s here with Shiro, and from the taste of it Shiro has cheap, bottom of the bottom shelf cheap whiskey. They could be at the dentist. They could be watching one of Martin’s crappy reality television shows and he’d probably be over the moon.

He understands the rules of the outing even if there were no spoken rules. In fact he understands the implicit much better than the explicit. Shiro brought him out here to talk if he wanted. Which meant he’d have to do the talking, at least at the start. And if he didn’t, it probably wasn’t a big deal to Shiro anyway.

Keith’s eyes travel from the bright silver fingertips that are wrapped around the pier’s railing to the cup in his hands and then back again. It’s a long round trip. His eyes keep wandering from their target to Shiro’s face. He can’t see much of it. Most of it is pulled up tightly in a big white scarf, but what he can see is blasted red from the cold.

“How did it happen?” he asks after what feels like hours but couldn’t have been more than minutes. There’s still a slight touch of warmth within his coffee.

“I’m not exactly sure,” Shiro admits. He looks disappointed, as if he’s been expecting the question but is still upset that he doesn’t have an answer. “I only know what people tell me happened. I was in an aerospace medical services unit. The whole goal was to prove myself. Work my way up to para-rescue. It didn’t quite happen that way.”

Keith downs the rest of his coffee before it becomes disgustingly cold. He tries to hide the shiver that sneaks from his shoulders to his hips when the whiskey hits. It burns just enough to hurt. Just like the cheap stuff should. “Lofty goal,” he notes. He tries to remember as little as possible from those flash in the pan two years of his life as possible, but certain things stick out like jagged edges in need of a filing. He can remember a special ops title when he hears one. “I think if anyone could’ve done special ops. It would’ve been you.”

“We were supposed to evacuate five people who had been seriously wounded due to fire earlier. We were told that the area had been cleared. One of my associates stepped on an errant mine. I was close. I reached back after it was detonated to try to push him out of the way. Which was stupid. I don’t remember much more after that.”

Keith lets the silence wash over them again. There’s really nothing else to ask because it doesn’t compare to riding home from work way, way, way after closing time in the snow because USPS finally delivered a part for a client’s bike you’d been waiting on for weeks right. Had to special order all the way from the factory. Which was across the ocean.

“You shouldn’t let the context of my injury prevent you from feeling the rawness of your own. You’ve still had your life changed completely by it.”

His ability to read people was positively frightening. Another reason he would’ve excelled in special ops.

It’s true though. Every 8:00 AM appointment is a fight to get out of bed. It’s not the time of day. He’s used to being at the shop at 7:45 so client can drop whatever they want off before work. It’s the dull led like feeling that starts in his foot creeps into his entire leg that tells him he’s useless now.

And as badly as he wants to hop back on the bike, or work a full 8 hours without feeling pain or exhaustion, or climb some goddamn stairs, it’s hard to imagine that a little more than a month ago he did those things all the time. Or that he’ll be able to do them again in a few weeks.

Keith tightens his jaw so hard his teeth hurt. Then, he speaks again. “So, what happened after? “

“Lots of time at the VA. Physical therapy and lots of CBT,” he replies. “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,” he elaborates when he remembers that he and Keith don’t quite speak the same career jargon. The root is the same but the dialects are worlds apart. “My body was wounded, but my mind felt absolutely broken.”

Keith responded in kind by pulling his bottom lip between his teeth this time. It hurt less that clenching his jaw for long stretches of time. Did he feel that way? No. He felt like he was watching something similar to his life through a frosted window. The shapes and colors were right, but the details were wrong.

“With my injury specifically, I felt like it was so small and artificial compared to what others were going through. I felt like it didn’t matter.”

Part of Keith’s mind thinks it’s stupid, because he lost an arm and that was in no way small or artificial. But maybe Shiro was doing that thing again where he could read the situation without him doing so much as talking. Maybe he was trying to validate the severity of his injury.

“And then after that, I just ended back up here At home. There was nothing here for me, and no where for me to go either.”

Keith lets out a single dark chuckle at that. He hasn’t felt it to the extremes he did when he was a child, but he’s no strange to the feeling. “I think I know what you’re talking about.” He doesn’t really want to reply, but apparently that’ how conversations work. Two sided.

“Then I was contacted by a large technology firm in town. They were in the final trial stages of a new line of prosthetics. They asked if I was interested in a clinical trial.”

“Guess you were,” Keith deadpans. He’s never seen anything like Shiro’s arm. Guesses he never will again. When he was 21 and worked night shift at the convenience store there was a regular who smoked Camels, played lotto, and had a big bulky hook hand. This was miles and miles away from that.

“Yeah,” Shiro breathes. This time Keith can see the air mist away from the scarf as he speaks. When he was talking about his time in the service, and the VA, and basically everything up until this point he’d seemed so in control and so present. But upon mentioning the trial he looks distant. Not cold, but startled of whatever was there. “I remember doing all of these dexterity tests at the main research campus downtown.” He touches each finger to his thumb from forefinger to pinky and then works his way back, like it’s etched in muscle memory. “Those were awful in their own kind of way.”

“Then graduate school, and then the present.”

It was selfish, but he wanted to know. What on this earth, if not war and mutilation, could make him react to something like the way he looked when he was talking about the trial?

Then again, maybe today was not the day to ask. Lance always told him that his timing was awful.

“This is going to sound stupid,” he says after another pause. But he’s going to say it anyway because the cold has numbed his face (or was it the shot of whiskey) and he doesn’t care as much as he did before he got out of the car. “I feel like everyone expects this to be a big deal for me. Like I’m going to completely change my life or something.”

As if to punctuate what he’s about to say, he digs into the too small pockets of his jeans and finds his cigarettes. He turns around so he’s facing the same way as Shiro to protect himself from the wind as he lights it. “Like Lance’s mom…well one of them. Rosalind. She’s really upset that I haven’t quit doing all the things she disagrees with.” He takes a drag, and then another one in rapid succession. “That’s nothing new we’ve been butting heads for years now. I’m just not going to change much of anything.”

There are a few insane joggers on the path now. They shuffle along and try not to slip on the sludge that’s formed across the poorly salted path. He thinks it’s stupid. Then again maybe they’d think the same thing if they saw him out here on his bike.

“You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself,” Shiro responds. “I mean, you’re probably not going to like this response, but whatever you end up doing you will end up being okay with it. It just might take longer than you anticipate.”

“You’re right I don’t.” Keith says, as he flicks his butt into the water. “But I don’t like the fact that you’re probably right even more.”

He can’t feel the tips of his ears or his nose, but he doesn’t want to be taken back to his apartment either. He wants more coffee, more whiskey, more of Shiro trying to help him make peace with whatever it is that’s smashed his decade long routine into a thousand uneven pieces.

But Shiro catches on to his discomfort before he can push it back. He picks up one crutch and let’s the rubber tipped end bounce lightly against the dock. “Let’s go back to the car. It’s freezing out here.”

They’re back in the car and a few miles out on the northbound interstate before they speak again. The car is warm, and the silence is comfortable.

* * *

Just when he thinks that Shiro can’t top himself, he does. By the Wednesday of his third week of treatment he’s still reeling from “getting coffee,” over the weekend.

Shiro asks, “Do you want to do something different on Friday?”

And of course Keith says yes. Shiro can introduce a new exercise every session, and he often tries, but it’s not enough to hold his attention.

“Okay,” Shiro sucks in a sharp breath and runs his hand along his undercut. Like he didn’t anticipate the conversation getting this far, and he doesn’t quite remember what he’s supposed to say if it did. “Are your evenings free? I can’t do it in the morning because of my other patients, but if you could meet me in the evenings at the Y…Or should we meet here around 4:00 and I’ll drive?”

Keith shoots him a confused look.

“Hydro therapy. Swimming. It’s about the only thing we really haven’t touched yet.”

Keith has a feeling shoot up his spine and into the base of his neck. It’s like getting a free ball in pinball or hanging a curve too fast on his bike, swooping down low toward the pavement, and still being able to make it back upright through the grace of something big and grander than himself.

And Shiro wants to go swimming with him. And this fits under their platonic truce.

He’s probably the luckiest man in the world. 

Never mind the fact that he can’t really swim all that well. He’d never done it until he was almost twelve and Rosalind had packed five of them into her car, and Edith packed the other four into hers and they’d both driven all the way down to the reservoir thirty miles south of town. He can remember blindly following Lance’s lead and cannonballing into the water, despite not having the slightest idea of what to do.

Luckily Lance dragged him up by the wrist when he didn’t come up right away.

So he still sucks at swimming, but he always associates the act as a very big deal. Something special. It makes his stomach do flip flops. “Can we meet here first?” he asks a little too quickly, barely containing his excitement.

“Sure.”

“It’s not distracting from your other patients?”

“I don’t have a reoccurring patient in that time slot anymore. They’ve finished,” Shiro responds. “Usually take about a week for slots to refill in between patients.”

Keith nods. He doesn’t completely understand, but he gets the slow trickle of clients followed by the overwhelming demand for services. February is almost over. They’re going to be swamped soon by requests to tune up bikes that haven’t seen the light of day since September.

* * *

When Friday morning finally arrives, like most things, he regrets the decision. He has to borrow a pair of swimming trunks from Lance, and he’s really glad he brought an extra shirt because suddenly the idea of being with Shiro shirtless for the purpose of therapy sounds extremely awful. He hasn’t had the time or opportunity to get used to the big ugly scar abrasions on his left side yet. Until today.

The pin pricks of self-consciousness continue to blossom against the back of his neck. There are looks that linger on too long on his neck and the back of his head as he takes the boot off in the locker room and hops out to the pool floor on his crutches.

The air is thick with dampness out on the pool deck. It’s a little too warm, and the smell of chlorine burns the back of his nose.

Then he remembers why he came. Shiro had changed with rapid speed, and was out on the deck doing stretches. He was wearing a shortened form of wetsuit, cropped above the elbow and knee. Despite the fact that Shiro usually wore very well fitting workout clothes to begin with, this was something else entirely. He can see the smooth dip of skin over the tight muscle of his arms and calves. By drinking him in like man in the desert, he’s probably breaking one, or many of their agreements, but he can’t help it. He’s imagining what Shiro’s hair is going to look like when it’s wet and pulled out of that all too perfect coif. But what if Shiro doesn’t go under water?

And then something hits him, like a speeding freight truck lined with explosives. Shiro’s not wearing his arm. It would be stupid to think it was waterproof but...He can’t help but feel like he’s seeing something he shouldn’t. Like this is something that is too deep, too intimate, and too meaningful for Shiro to share with him.

Then again, Shiro must want him to see this, or at least be comfortable with the idea if they’re here and they’re doing this together.

“Keith,” Shiro calls and waves him over to the shallow end of the pool. There are steps here as well as an accessibility ramp. Keith breaths a sigh of relief, because he was so concerned that he’d be able to get into the pool but not back out.

“Ready?”

“Yeah,”

“Don’t worry about getting in and out. You’re stronger than you think,” Shiro responds. He’s got his arm out for his crutches, and Keith reluctantly hands them to him.

Shiro parks the crutches against the wall. He braces his weight against the accessibility ramp, and wait for a shooting pain that starts in his ankle and ends in his hip. He takes one step forward, then two.

It doesn’t come.

Sure there’s still a bit of an ache there, but it’s nothing deep. Nothing that couldn’t be easily soothed.

“See, what did I tell you?” Shiro says as he steps into the pool himself. Keith can’t help but smile when Shiro grimaces at the temperature. It’s cool, but it’s not cold. He wouldn’t take Shiro as the kind of guy who’d be overly sensitive to that kind of thing, considering they’d recently spent almost an hour hanging outside in the snow.

Together they make their way towards deeper waters. “We’re going to start with some stuff for your hip and back. Put your arms up against the edge like this.” Shiro spreads his arms out straight so they’re resting on the pool’s edge. “Then lift your legs up.”

Keith copies his movements.

“Bend at the knee and then rock from side to side.” Keith begins the exercise. Back and forth and back and forth. He doesn’t really have to think much about these, just keep his body in the right position. It’s almost kind of soothing in comparison to the other exercises they usually do. “This is better than all the other stuff,” he needs to make sure to tell Shiro as much because he’s still got three weeks left. They need to do this more.

“Most people think that. I have to introduce all the home exercises first before we can get to the fun stuff.”

Next Shiro has him touch his knee to his elbow. They’re a lot like standing knee bends, but they make him feel much, much more stupid.

“I know I’m a bit late in saying it, but thanks for coming out last weekend,” Shiro says between showing him new exercises.

It’s such a Shiro thing to say. Shiro spent most of the time reliving his crappy memories to help him cope. He should be the one saying thank you, but Shiro was beating him to it.

Keith pauses for a moment. He lets the words hang there for a moment. “I liked it,” he decides finally.

Next Shiro has him put on these big awkward weights designed for underwater training and has him cycle through all sorts of kicking motions. He kicks outward. Right. Left. Right. Then to the side right side, left side, right side.

“You took me for coffee, maybe I should take you for a drink sometime.” It’s hard to say with a straight face especially when the water is cool and the air around him is so artificially warm. It’s hard for his body to make up its mind. Was he hot, or was he cold? It’s hard to say with a straight face when Shiro was so close.

Somehow he manages.

“I’d like that,” Shiro responds.

* * *

After the session, Keith’s hair freezes into thin brittle strands out in the cold. Shiro’s got apparently got the whole swimming in the dead of winter thing down to a science. He’d brought toiletries so he could wash the chlorine off right away. Now, he’s got his covered by a cap, and he wished he’d remembered to bring one too so he could do the same. Instead of holding his gym bag in his lap like he did on the way over, he places his things in the back seat.

“Would you mind taking me home instead of going back to your office?”

“I can do that,” Shiro responds.

Shiro pulls into the parking lot in his complex and kills the engine.

Keith doesn’t make any moves to unbuckle his belt or open the door. It’s just like over the weekend after they’d gone to the river front, but magnified. “Would you like to get the drink tonight?” Keith asks. It’s a pretty big risk, hanging out right after a session like that. He can still recall with stark detail the tension that hung between them the night he fixed Shiro’s car.

Shiro taps the steering wheel a few times with either thumb as they sit at a stoplight. “I did tell Pidge to just go ahead and lock up when she was done filing….Why not?”

Luckily, Keith’s kept his apartment livable since the moms invaded. The garbage situation is decidedly under control, the dishes are done, and the dirty laundry although numerous, is confined to his closet. He thinks he can manage having Shiro in his apartment for fifteen minutes while he showers.

Hopefully.


	8. The Trick Shot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters will come out more slowly as I head back to work full time. Only 3 or so more left.

Keith wipes the steam from the mirror and takes a long hard look at himself. It’s the look he gives Lance when he wants to communicate, “you’re a real piece of work.” Cause the last time of he’s been this excited to take a guy out, and had very little intention of getting in his pants, was when a cop from the next town over gave him his number, in addition to a speeding ticket. He thought _maybe_ the date could get him out of it.

It didn’t exactly go that way.

“Fuck,” Keith says under his breath as he fumbles through the pile of clean clothes he’d brought into the bathroom with him. Jeans, check. Underwear, check. Socks, check. No shirt.

It’s just plain shitty design that his bathroom is just off the kitchen and he has to walk through the living room to get to the bedroom and his clean shirts.

It’s kind of maybe a little bit stupid that he doesn’t strap his boot on over his jeans before he darts out, but it’s such a goddamn hassle.

In hindsight, he really should’ve seen Shiro standing in the far end of the living room by the kitchen entrance. Guy’s hard to miss, but his focus is razor sharp. Make it from the bathroom into the bedroom as quickly as possible without falling on his ass or aggravating his unbooted foot.

So before he can even tell up from down, he’s knocking into a wall of a compact muscle, and he can feel his bum leg sliding out from underneath him on the cheap linoleum floor.

Before he can so much as say, “oof,” from knocking into Shiro’s imposing form he can feel a hand on his wrist and another on his hip steadying him.

“Sorry,” Shiro says with hand still clinched tightly around his fist and another on his hip.

Suddenly, Keith is made very aware that the towel he’d had draped over his shoulders to cover most of his torso has been knocked to the ground amidst the chaos. He’s not a fan of leaving the heater on when he’s not at home, so the apartment is still very very cold from his nine hour absence. As water droplets drip from his hair down his spine, it feels like someone is dragging an icy can of beer down his back.

Keith is used to the strange and primal feeling of being stared at. From the days in his childhood where he stood out like a sore thumb in dirty clothes that were too big, to the present where he stands out for hopping along with crutches.

He doesn’t lock gazes with calm and kind brown black eyes. Instead, there’s something there that’s smoky and ember like. Shiro looks hungry, needy, and undeniably human.

It’s such a contrast from what he’s used to with Shiro. His eyes are always caught in that space that’s right before a laugh and it makes him look so warm.

He wants to derail the whole situation by slouching, pushing out his gut, and asking him if he likes what he sees. It would certainly diffuse the situation.

Each breath feels thick and pained as he watches Shiro watch him.

Finally Shiro’s tight grip recedes and he shakes the hunger from his expression.

Keith debates picking up the towel in order to re-establish some pinch of modesty. He looks at the towel on the ground and realizes that there are shop towels at the garage with fewer stains. Maybe the less awkward option was partial nudity.

Maybe he just wanted to try to elicit that kind of reaction from Shiro again as soon as possible.

Sorry,” he repeats. “I was just looking at your photos.”

Fuck. Strike the previous statement from the records, because he wasn’t eliciting shit if they were talking about family photos.

“Oh yeah,” Keith turns back to the wall Shiro was facing when he rammed into him. Much like every interaction he has with Rosalind, he can’t decide if he wants to curse her or thank her for tacking up a bunch of old photos in cheap dollar store frames. She’d said he’d needed something in here. “Lance’s mom put those up for me when I moved in like, four years ago.”

“Hm,” Shiro turns back to the photos too as if nothing had happened between them seconds ago. “You seem very close.”

Keith isn’t great at reading people, but he’s had this conversation before. It’s code for, “Is she Lance’s mom, or your mom?” At least he’s doing it tactfully. Most people just flat out ask why he doesn’t call the women who’ve raised him for almost twenty years mom.

“I joined the clan a little late. So they’re Lance’s moms, but yeah they’re all family.” In reality by the tie he met Lance in grade school, he’d already had enough time and awareness to build up a distain for titles like “mother,” and “father,” but that was a conversation for another time.  

“All of them?”

Shiro’s gesturing to a photo of all of Rosalind’s kids, and all of Edith’s kids, plus him. There are eleven people in the photo in total, and they’re standing in front of Mt. Rushmore because they could only afford to go to national parks for “vacation,” which happened once every three or four years depending on funds.

“Yep,” Keith nods. “I am the world’s most attention starved only child.”  

“I can’t imagine growing up with so many people.  I only had my brother growing up.”

“Better than where I was before. Never enough to go around though.” Keith says. “Not like we were ever hungry or cold or anything. I just remember stuff like having to share this beat up leather jacket with Lance that we got at Goodwill for $5. One of us could look cool and the other would have to wear the dopey puffy coat. Or we got paper routes and went snuck off alone to get ice cream so we wouldn’t have to buy some for everyone.”

“Where’s the woman who brings you to the office sometime?” Shiro doesn’t have to ask which one is Lance. Of nine kids, he and Lance were the only boys in the lot. “Is it her?” Shiro pokes at one of the faces in the photo.

“No, that’s Martin’s twin Mike,” he says. Without thinking he walks his finger down the rest of the row. “There’s Martin, Toni, Justin, Charlie, Mac, and Salmon.” And he’d better explain the names too because everyone always asks. “They all have weird names because Edith’s ex husband always bitched about wanting boys I guess. So Antonia, Justina, and Charlene became Toni, Justin, and Charlie. I guess it kind of caught on when the two smashed their families into one giant fucking family.”

Shiro laughs. It’s different from the one he gives whenever Keith says something crass or vaguely uncomfortable. Instead it’s deep, and laden with several emotions that Keith can’t quite place. But he knows that the laughter is warm, and that’s all that matters. He really wants to make Shiro do it again.

“Salmon? Where did that even come from?”

Keith rolls his eyes. “Hers is kind of dumb. She had this big body pillow that was a salmon. She took it everywhere.”  

“You’d probably fit right in. Since I’ve never even heard anyone call you by your “real” name. Other than maybe those diplomas you have back behind the reception desk.”

“My mother calls me Takeshi,” Shiro replies like he’s trying to convince Keith. “Why didn’t you and Lance have nicknames?”

“Um…I don’t really know.” at this point Keith says as he finishes the trek into his room. His nipples could probably cut glass right now, and that means nothing if they’re still going to talk about cutesy shit like childhood nicknames. “Lance and I had alter egos for awhile because I had “trouble”’ he takes the time to make air quotes in between putting his arms into the shirt and pulling it down across his chest. “Talking to girls and Lance had this idea that if I ‘became’ someone else it would all work out.” He grabs his boot from underneath the floor and begins doing the straps while Shiro remains in the living room.

“So who were you?”

“I was Simon Matsuda and he was Lyle Hernandez.”

Shiro laughs again. Twice in one night. He’s on a roll. “Lyle?”

“Yeah, well…He thought he was helping me, so he picked out a crappy name. It obviously helped immensely.”

“Simon and Lyle retired when you denounced heterosexuality?”

“No, not exactly,” Keith replies as he tries to comb his hair out the best he can. He doesn’t own a hair drier and wants to have most of the moisture removed as possible before they step outside again lest they repeat the earlier hair freezing experience.

Shiro simply lingers in the hall way between his room and his living room. He wants to invite Shiro in, ask him to sit on the bed or the old metal desk chair he’s got in the corner, but he’ll be finished getting ready soon.

“We retired those particular aliases when we were caught tagging at a local park and had to give our names.”

“I’m sure that worked out well.”

“Yeah, cop dropped us off, and Edith said if she ever heard another fucking thing about Simon and Lyle she was going to beat us with a switch so hard our asses would be redder than Santa Clause’s drunk fucking nose.”

Shiro purses his lips as if he’s not sure if it’s appropriate to laugh.

Keith senses this discomfort, so he keeps talking. “Me and Lance had to not burst into laughing while she said it. Then Rosalind laid into her even worse than Edith laid into us.”

 “Onto the next alter ego then?”

Keith looks away in shame. The feeling that entrenches his body every time he’s overwhelmed with second hand embarrassment for his past self….For past Lance…can only be described as pure and unadulterated mortification. “Oh yeah. There was Ken, Min, and Steve too.”

Keith puts on his jacket and reaches for his wallet, keys, knife….the essentials really. “Okay, so you have two choices really. We can go to the Amvets down the street, or this other bar I go to, or I’m open to suggestions.”

“You don’t exactly seem like an Amvets kind of guy.” Shiro says with the spark of a question on his smile and in his eyes.

Amvets was an old social club for veterans. Shitty drinks, shitty atmosphere, shitty service at the local location. “I joined because It’s right down the street. I can walk there when I’ve already had a few.”

“Compelling,” Shiro deadpans. “So this ‘other place.’”

“Hunks Place on High and 7th. Lance is pretty good friends with the owner, Martin works there. If we go there we’ll have to deal with people I know.” He’s not exactly sure why he says that part out loud. Shiro probably wouldn’t care about that, even if he does.

“Sounds okay. I hear they have good food.”

“You have no idea.”

* * *

“I’m not doing it,” Shiro decides and drains the last of his drink. “I feel like I need to save my luck for when I’ve had a few.”

“I’m willing to bet you’ve never done anything risky in your life,” Keith decides after Shiro is unwilling to accept his dare, send back his whiskey soda and ask Martin for a Zima instead. It would be absolutely hilarious to see her face drop and try to self-censor. Cause if Shiro was with anybody else other than him, she’d tell him to put his big boy pants on and get the fuck over it. “In fact, I’m betting that you’ve never had so much as a hair on your head out of place, Shirogane.” He says sternly after he drains his drink.

It’s still early for a Friday night, which means they can actually hear each other talk instead of yelling at each other over the juke box.

 “Another one for the docta,” Martin says with a cheeky smile as she sets a whiskey soda in front of Shiro. “And another one for the Keith,” she says as she sets an identical drink in front of Keith. She drops the drink tray from the palm of her hand to clamped between her elbow and side in an instant. Then, she ruffles his hair playfully with the other. “Yell if you need anything.”

Normally something like that would set him off. Nothing major just a teeth clenched fists clamped, what have I done to deserve this Martin? Kind of way.  Tonight, absolutely nothing can touch him.

“I’ll have you know I was quite adventurous in college.”

Keith raises his brow. Whatever was going to come out of Shiro’s mouth next was going to be absolutely golden.

“I was working at the human biology lab my last two years, and there’s this stuff that doctors give you to drink before an x-ray so they can find clots. I got ahold of some of this…and put it in my unsuspecting lab mates’ drinks.”

Keith’s other brow raises as well. Not the direction he thought the conversation was going to go.

“After drinking this….” Shiro pauses for a moment and purses his lips together like he’s trying to hold something back. “Solution, it turns your urine bright green.”

Shiro laughs a little more when he’s a drink and a half in. Shiro finally lets down that big impenetrable wall when he’s a drink and a half in, and it’s so goddamn relieving. “My lab mates didn’t find it half as amusing as I did.”

“No way,” Keith goads. “This was before the military though right? That must’ve zapped it right out of you.”

“Not exactly.” Shiro gets a little red in the face when he’s about a drink and a half in. A lot more if you embarrass him, and Keith finds out quite quickly it’s not hard.

Keith snaps his fingers and points downward at the table. “Spill,” he demands before he takes the first sip of his new drink. “God fucking damn Martin,” he coughs a few times as he puts his glass down. “She’s trying to kill me.” Maybe she felt the “let’s fuck with Martin” vibes from his side of the table from across the bar.

“When I was in PT school there was this dental fraternity on campus,”

“That’s a thing?”

“Absolutely, and they were the worst.  Big loud parties all the time. The dental school at state isn’t exactly the best. It’s mostly just kids with money.”

Keith nod into the rim of his drink in order to keep himself from talking. Probably most kids at state are kids with money, which is probably why the place gives him hives.

“My roommate’s girlfriend left him for a dental student, so we had to do what was right and honorable. They had this concrete tooth statue out front of their building. Not huge but pretty heavy.  It was stupid looking. So, we just sort of got a hand truck, rigged it just right, and stole it.”

Keith can feel the burn of whiskey as it threatens to shoot from his mouth to his nose as he laughs mid sip. He has to hold this one in though. He does not want to burn off all of his nose hairs in the process, and this drink is strong enough to do it.

 “I have toned it down a lot recently. I think the worst thing I do these days is hide Pidge’s stuff where she can’t reach, which is everywhere.”

“I would’ve never imagined the honorable Dr. Shirogane had it in him.”

“There’s a lot more than what you see in the office.”

“Looking forward to seeing more of it then.” Keith says trying to sound smooth. He wouldn’t know smoothness if wrapped him in a velvet caress and bit him in the ass. 

Speaking of smoothness (or lack thereof) Lance walks into the bar like he owns the place. In no time Lance spots them at the booth and his eyes go as wide as the fishbowl of beer he’s got in his hand.

Keith expects an awkward thumbs up or a patented Lance “gettin’ some” eyebrow raise. So him simply waving and walking over to the table is beyond tame in comparison.

“Keith,” Lance slaps him a few times on the shoulder.  “Doctor,” he switches over to finger guns and shoots at Shiro a few times. Oh. He was saving the well intentioned, yet cringey behavior for later. “Glad to see you could pry this one out of the house.”

“Hey Lance,” Keith says.

“Hello Lyle,” Shiro says in the same tone he uses to call back his patients. It’s calm and not at all brimming with the laughter that hides in his eyes.

Lance looks at him like he’s going to faint. “You told about the aliases?”

 Shiro being the goddamn gentleman that he is scoots over so that Lance can join them. Keith’s ass stays firmly planted in the seat. He’s been left at the bar over a drink more than a few times because Lance had to go chase someone. Lance owes him this.

Keith opts to change the subject. “Tell me you didn’t start in on Big John’s engine rebuild after I left.”

“Um maaaybe,” Lance says as he sets his fishbowl down. “But I didn’t come over to talk about work. I came over to ask your physician something.”

“Ask away,” Shiro says.

“What’s the deal with the guy who works your reception desk? Is he…” There it is. There’s the eyebrow raise. Lance is so confident in what he’s saying, and he has no idea that he’s about to crash and burn so hard. “Seeing anyone? See I was taking my little sister Salmon down to tour campus, and I saw him out there and I was thinking he and I could-- ”

Shiro shoots him a glance. It looks like it says, “How do I handle this?”

Keith shoots him one back. They don’t have a lot of practice with looks yet, so he hopes he conveys the following, “Drag him, but let him live.”

“Well first of all,” Shiro begins slowly as if he’s still choosing his words. “He’s a girl.”

Lance’s eyes go narrow.

“But I haven’t seen Pidge with anyone in awhile, so maybe you could ask her yourself if you come by the office,” Shiro says it without a hint of condescending in his tone. Not even a pinch of annoyance. 

That hardly counted as a tug let alone a drag. If they were going to hang out they needed to work on his ability to make sure Lance could take what he dished out on the regular.

“She…ask her….” Lance takes a large gulp of his drink in thought. “Okay.” Lance’s fingers rap against the dark splintered wood of the booth’s tabletop. “Will do that.”

“Lance, don’t be embarrassed it happens to her a lot,” Shiro supplies. He can’t taunt him for shit, but he might be able to assuage the anxiety that nips at Lance’s heels wherever he goes. That’s enough to make him forgive being unable to drag Lance.

“I was unsure too,” Keith supplies.

“Well I’ll let you guys get back to it. I’ve got to find Hunk and see if he wants to get on the Spring poker run,” Lance says a little too quickly before he darts.

“I’m so sorry,” Shiro says from underneath his clasped hands. The tips of his index fingers rest near his tearducts, and Keith can swear that his scar blends in with the rest of his flushed skin tone.

“I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” Keith says in between sips. “Lance is never one to hold a grudge.”

The conversation doesn’t pick back up again, so Keith goes for an old standby. “Come on, let’s play pool or darts or something. If we just sit here and get drunk it’ll be boring.”

* * *

After a few shots Keith can’t decide if Shiro’s really bad at pool or if he’s about to get hustled for every dime in his wallet.  His break is flat out depressing. His form is just plain awful. He gouges the worn foam green velvet of the table with his cue. Aims for stripes and ends up hitting solids.

“Shiro, come on. I know a hustle when I see one. I’ve been getting kicked out of pool halls since I was ten.”

“I’m not hustling,” Shiro all but begs. “If this were cards or something maybe.” Shio bends at the waist and tries to line his cue up with the s

“Look,” Keith leans into the table. His stance is a little off, but he doesn’t care because he can tell he’s improving. A few weeks ago he would’ve been doubled over in pain long before he was lining up the cue for a shot. “It’s all about the stance and the way you hold the cue. “You gotta make sure you’re standing behind the shot. Your left foot,” he taps his booted foot awkwardly. “Needs to be left of your cue always.” Keith lines up his cue. “Right foot is easy. Right in line with the shot.”

He takes the shot and sinks the four, then the five, and finally the six. The seven has suffered dearly from Shiro’s poor break and Keith’s own inadequate attempts at fixing said break.

Shiro lines up with the cue ball. “Left of the cue,” He’s mouthing Keith’s instructions to himself softly, and it makes Keith just want to pinch his cheeks or something because it’s the cutest. “Right, in line,” he checks the alignment of his foot with the cue ball, and bends at the waist.

“Shiro,”

Shiro jumps back up to a ramrod straight posture as if Keith has startled him. “Sorry, just one more thing. You’re going to ruin your shot holding the cue like that.”

Maybe it’s the liquor. Maybe it’s a contact high from the last time he went out for a smoke and there were some guys sharing a joint back by the dumpster. Maybe it’s because he’s been good for four whole weeks, and he’s had enough because if Shiro looks good in his office, he looks great under the smoky dim lighting of a dive bar. Regardless of what it actually is, Keith makes the few strides over to Shiro surprisingly gracefully considering his crutches have been long abandoned at the booth.

Shiro’s body is warm and pliant in front of him. “Pinky, index, and thumb on the grass,” Keith says moving his hand into place on the table. “Cue goes between the thumb and index.” He places a hand on Shiro’s shoulder as he moves the cue into place. It’s not the first time Keith’s been the one explaining something to Shiro, but it is the first time it’s justified contact.  

 “Relaxed grip or firm?” Shiro turns his head slightly to look at him. He can feel Shiro’s breath tickle his skin. If he weren’t positive that Shiro were absolutely a man of his word, he’d swear he was being wrung through the seduction 101 ringer.

“Loosen up a little,” Keith husks. “And take the shot.”

He manages to take a half step backwards for Shiro to actually follow through on his instruction.

Shiro actually manages to sink one ball.

“Good job man.”

“I had an exceptional instructor,” Shiro beams.

“You’ll be able to do this in no time,” Keith is hot with pride and testosterone and liquor. He can’t do much of anything about it other than showboat. He sinks the eight, the nine, and the next thing he knows he’s clearing the table in one go. He’s not drunk enough yet to try to show him a trick shot. This isn’t high school.

“Don’t you need to go out for a smoke or something?” Shiro asks while he fidgets. He wrings his fingers together and runs a hand back at the base of his ear. It’s the first time Keith has ever seen him out of his element.

Never though he’d hear a doctor ask him something like that, but something is up. He’s dying to know just what it is. He sincerely doubts Shiro wants to bum a smoke off of him.

“Yeah,” Keith grabs for his coat and cocks his head toward the door. “C’mon doc.”

* * *

As soon as they hit the porch, Shiro is on him.

Keith can’t decide which is more jarring. The searing hot feel of Shiro’s mouth against his own, or the crisp night air against his flushed skin. It’s like he’s being plunged into ice water and set on fire at the very same time.

He can’t get enough of it.

Shiro’s lips are soft, not chapped and neglected from years of riding out in harsh weather without lip balm. Shiro’s mouth is strong, but not demanding. His kiss is a calm yet powerful force that makes him feel at ease, much like Shiro himself.

Keith can feel Shiro push him against the wall. There’s a hand tangled in his hair, and the kiss goes on and on. Keith wants to drown in it.

But Shiro, because he’s Shiro and he’s considerate and he’s kind forces him to come up for air.

“Keith,” Shiro all but growls.

Keith pulls him by the collar back into another kiss. He’s selfish, and he doesn’t want Shiro to come to from whatever trance he’s in and stop.

Keith makes sure Shiro’s tilted just right before he demands his mouth. All of it. Shiro’s tongue meets his own.  Sure, he tastes like whiskey, but he’s not slurring or stumbling. It can’t be just the liquor and has to be something else.

It has to be a mutual attraction that’s burning at both ends and has finally met in the middle.

Shiro breaks the kiss again, and holds him firm by the shoulders. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do this.”


	9. Placid Scowl

When Shiro wakes the next morning he isn’t hungover. Sure, he feels the firm weight of regret in his chest. But it’s wholly regret hammering away at his mind, not the telltale headache that takes the brain hostage and slams it against his skull over and over again.

Shiro has always had to find a constant balance between the impulsive side of him and the part of his brain that was reserved and utilitarian.

Normally, when those two sides of him fall out of sync he doesn’t feel quite so sick to his stomach.

The thing that really gets him, the thing that really grabs his stomach, squeezes it, and makes it goes sour, is that he knows exactly why he did it. Sure there was a mutual attraction there. That had been apparent for several weeks now. But there were other things there. Issues that ran deep, all the way into past life times.

He’d done something like this before, and desperately wanted the outcome to be different.

He’d agreed to meet up with Matt several days before. He’d felt nervous about it all week, and last night was some kind of attempt to wrestle control back from the panicked part of his brain. Although what kind of control, remained uncertain. The more he thought about it, the more disturbing the strange circular line of logic became. He wanted Keith. He wanted Keith last night specifically to show he was over it. At the same time, he didn’t want Keith while he was still his patient to show he’d learned from it.

The simplest way to avoid his past mistakes were to not make the same actions again and expect a different result.

Shiro shakes the thought from his head, gets up, and heads to the shower. If he dwells on it too much before his meeting with Matt it’s going to put him in a worse mood.

* * *

When Keith wakes the next morning, he almost wishes he were hungover. If he were, he could’ve almost justified not gently pushing Shiro away. He certainly could’ve justified leaning back in and demanding more from Shiro over and over and over again without questioning why.

He and Shiro had a deal. It was a mutual thing, and it sure as hell wasn’t just Shiro’s job to make sure it was upheld.

If he’d learned anything about his physical therapist, his friend, is that he was a man of his word. Shiro didn’t break the agreement because he’d suddenly changed his mind or suddenly started thinking with his dick. Something had made Shiro vulnerable. Whether it was just the fact that they were two people attracted to each other, or if there was something else going on remained unclear.

The fact of the matter was he’d played into that vulnerability. It made him feel sick.  As the person who told Shiro they could be friends, he should’ve risen to the occasion and let him know he could be counted on.

Keith throws the dark faded duvet off of himself and gets up with a start. It’s probably unwise to do much of anything about it today. A shit mood like this can’t be remedied. Only weathered. He was going to finish up his projects at the shop, and then he was going to work himself until his knuckles were busted and his face was read with anger.

He’d start by spot welding the salvageable parts of Peaches. If he got done with that he was going to stat sanding down all the parts that needed repainting and prime them until he could think, see, and feel only in matte gray.

His mood doesn’t get better once he gets into the shop. He spends most of the morning fumbling around not getting much of anything accomplished other than swearing under his breath.

“What the actual fuck is your problem dude?” Lance asks from over a gearbox he’s been working on since he dragged his ass into the shop that morning. “You’ve been insufferable all damn day.”

Lance has decided to say this after he’s launched a fucked up (and still hot) welding rod at his toolbox. The comment makes him want to grab the canister of welding rods he has nearby and launch them in Lance’s general direction.

But Peaches is fucked, and whatever it is that he had going with Shiro is fucked. Basically everything that matters is fucked, so why not start something with Lance just to get everything really extremely fucked?

Keith tosses another rod in Lance’s direction.

Lance sighs, but refuses to take the bait. He clicks his tongue against the back of his teeth a few times. It’s a nasty and annoying habit he’s picked up from Edith over the years. There are more dignified ways to chide. “Keith, I’ve been dealing with you for years now. It’s going to take a lot more effort to get me riled up.” Lance rests one of the detached gears back onto his workspace and crosses the invisible line that divides his bay from Lances. “Wanna try using your words?”

“Not really.”

“Kay,” Lance supplies dryly. “Then I’m going to use this moment to use mine.” Lance pulled over a spare folding chair and sat on it backwards so that his arms were resting over the backrest of the chair and his legs were spread wide. “Point one: You’re being a dick.” The look in his eyes is almost sinister as if to say, “try throwing something at me now.”

“Point one: grievance one. Coulda told me that Pidge was a girl. Point one: grievance two. The next time you borrow my car please for the love of all that is holy, do not leave it on the easy listening station. It gives me a rash. Point one: grievance three-“

Keith bites is tongue and lets the rage smolder. It’s all he can do, because in some bigger and grander scheme of the universe, he probably deserves this.

* * *

It’s been awhile, but Shiro still notices certain things. The dark circles under his eyes have somehow gotten darker from the last time they’ve seen each other. Maybe he’s sleep deprived, maybe he’s dehydrated. Given his past patterns of behavior, probably both.

Matt’s hands are icy cold when they touch for a brief and stiff handshake. No surprise there. Many people thought that Shiro got his white patch from stress. In reality, feeling Matt’s icy cold feet against his bare legs aged him considerably.

The nervousness doesn’t evaporate when they part from the half handshake half hug. It might actually amplify, but when he says, “It’s good to see you,” he means it.  

Shiro guessed that Matt would start talking about a clinical before their drinks even arrived. In reality, he waited until not only the drinks had arrived, but they’d also ordered. Maybe Matt was calming down with age.

Maybe it could wait because Shiro had been dodgy with taking his calls and reluctant to meet up.

Shiro was over it. Has been for a long while, but it’s typically hard to remember that when he’s getting lost in Matt’s warmth and his large honey colored eyes. It’s hard to remember when Matt is talking about something that he doesn’t understand, but he’s hanging on intently to every single word.

It’s funny, the circumstances in which he’s able to kick the habit.

 “Its been four years. There are actually quite a few advancements made to the newest model.”

Shiro listens to every word he’s saying. He knows he’s making some good points. The arm won’t last forever, and if he formally severs his relationship with Holt technologies and the university’s research hospital, he’s probably going to go back to VA issued prosthetics that pale in comparison. 

“I don’t know. I’m kind of attached to this one,” he responds. He flexes his fingers in the way he remembers from back in the trials. Pinky to thumb, ring finger to thumb, middle finger to thumb, index finger to thumb and back down the line again. “Hey, write that sequence down.”

Matt does little more than roll his eyes. “We’re also looking to do a longitudinal study with our initial cohort. It could be a really great opportunity to understand how the entire process affects people. Injury, recovery, adjustment to one prosthetic, adjustment to another.”

Shiro is listening, but it’s hard to keep focused.

“We’ve got people on the team from psych, sociology, public health. It’s really a huge study.”

 He’s not really one for fidgeting, but today is the exception. He moves from stirring the ice in his drink to leafing through the sugar packets like they’re patient files.

“Shiro,”

What’s eating him? The fact that clinical trials remind him of right after his injury? Or…

“Shiro,” Matt waves his hand in front of his face snapping from the trance like state he was in. “What’s up?”

Shiro turns his gaze from his the checked pattern of the tablecloth to Matt. His brows are knit in a concerned expression. It’s his scientist face, the one that says he’s going to expect an answer one way or the other.

Shiro clears his throat. It’s a stalling tactic. He and Matt can and do get along…but how tactful is it really to talk to your ex about how you’ve got it bad for a patient?

In that moment Shiro remembers the touches that were rushed before reason flowed back to either of them. He can feel Matt beneath him and unease above him.  So thoroughly burned in his memory is waking up in a cold sweat. Sometimes Matt would be there beside him. More often than not he’d be in his office running computations, and he’d wake up alone.

 Then again, who would understand what happened more than Matt?

So before he can even second guess himself, he finds it spilling out of his mouth. “Do you ever…regret what happened?”

Matt’s expression goes flat. Shiro swears that between the ability to mask his expression and the raw intelligence, his talent is wasted in research and development. He needs to be pushing his way to the richest tables in Vegas or a hostage negotiator. It’s crazy just how much he can glean without being read.

“Shiro,” he speaks after a pause. Then he pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Pardon my language, but where the hell is this coming from?” It’s funny, the way Pidge swears enough to make a sailor blush. Shiro doesn’t think he’s ever heard Matt say anything worse than “damnit.”

“I’ve…Got a bit of a problem on my hands.”

“I’m not sure that I follow Shiro.”  Matt continues to fidget. He adds more sugar to his refilled coffee, then he goes for the diminutive container of cream. Finally, he loses himself into swirling the light colored cream into the opaque coffee with his spoon over and over again.

“Crossed some boundaries with a patient,” Shiro interjects quickly.  He probably should’ve prefaced that before he almost gave Matt a heart attack. The last time they broke up they’d agreed that was it. No more failed attempts. Or any other kinds of attempts.

“Crossed boundaries how?” Matt says cautiously. Because the “How” and the “Why” of how they met had always been a point of contention in their relationship, not only between themselves but among others. Still was if he was being perfectly honest. Cost them the relationship. Almost cost Matt his job.

There were a lot of possible boundaries that could be crossed.

“I’ve been seeing him outside of sessions. I thought I could help him work through some of his issues dealing with his injury. Started platonic-“

Matt’s right eyebrow is threatening to migrate into his hairline if he doesn’t stop bullshit.

“Started platonic enough.  Currently something vaguely romantic and definitely sexual.” He feels so sterile reporting back all of this information, but he doesn’t know how else to phrase it. He doesn’t want to tell anyone about what happened outside of the bar. Not because he was ashamed, but because it was kind of great if he didn’t think about all of the possible ethical issues there. It was an experience that belonged to him and Keith.

Shiro can practically see the gears turning in Matt’s mind. He’s got several possible pathways and outcomes going through his mind. He’s analyzing each hypothetical option. Finally, after a very long pause, Matt speaks. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but this problem exists on two fronts. You allowed this to happen, which you see as a problem. Additionally, you wouldn’t mind if it continued, which you also see as a problem considering your past experiences with these kinds of interactions.”

Shiro nods. Matt’s straight to the point, succinct. Naturally detached. Shiro feels like he’s back in one of the fluorescent white examination rooms at the VA instead of at their old haunt, First Avenue Diner. He half expects Matt’s eyes to be blocked out by the harsh glare of examination lights spread evenly over his glasses, and he’s relieved when they’re not.

As far as he’s concerned, off work Matt has been, and always will be far better and far more approachable than at work Matt.

“I don’t think anything can be as disastrous as we were,” Matt continues. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”

Shiro almost chokes on his drink at that statement. He’s had years now to get used to the brand of bluntness that he possess, unyielding to the point of being cruel. Knowing Matt and Pidge for years has aided in this process, but this particular statement hits hard. They’ve openly commented about how things might’ve been different if they’d met at different times, under different circumstances.

Like now. If he was just a PT who happened to meet a medical engineer. Maybe they’d date, maybe they’d fall in love, maybe they’d be functional as a couple.

But neither of them has ever been quite so frank about the nature of their relationship.

Shiro doesn’t exactly disagree. It could easily be likened to a barely functional train leaving the station, building up to breakneck speed, and wrecking into disastrous crescendo. 

“Come on. I open up and this is the best you’ve got?”

“Look man, I am honestly trying.”

Their waitress comes back and brings Matt the large slice of pecan pie he’d ordered long before Shiro had even had the chance to look at the menu. In another lifetime he’d order a slice of cherry as soon as the waitress had placed his first slice on the table. She says she’ll be right back with his sandwich, but she’s said that at least three times already.

 “This may sound shocking to you, but I don’t exactly meet a lot of new people either.” He says as he tucks into his pie. Holts were part hummingbird subsiding on little more than sugar, caffeine, and more sugar.

I’m not going to tell you to date this guy, but,” Matt’s poker face fades for a minute. There’s something soft and apology like within his expression. “I don’t think I, of all people, can rightfully tell you not to do it.”

Matt’s right, but he’s missing something critical. Shiro doesn’t particularly blame either of them for what happened. They were young and stupid. He was starved for affection and desperate for something to soothe the big ugly emotional burns that lingered beneath scarred skin. Matt was running his first clinical. He wanted to help, and then things escalated because he hadn’t had enough experience with vulnerable patients. He didn’t have the experience or the wherewithal to establish proper boundaries. It didn’t help that they both legitimately liked each other.

He’d liked to think that he learned _something_ from that experience.

“Have you thought about the numerous things that are different about this?” He says as he spoons the whipped cream from the top of the pie and eats it all in one mouthful.

Of course he has. It’s probably what pushed him over the line in the sand to begin with.

Keith isn’t him. Keith isn’t a shell shocked veteran coming right back home from active combat. He’s not trying desperately to adjust to life where he expects to be woken up by explosions and gunfire. Keith isn’t demanding to be taken care of like he was.

And for that matter, he’s not Matt. He’s been at his own practice for a few years now, and hasn’t fallen for the first decent looking guy that tries to hit on him. He’s not naieve in the way Matt was back then to think that love and modern medicine could cure all. He could separate what he could and could not do for his patients. He could show them exercises that would facilitate the healing process. He couldn’t act as therapist, social worker, or companion.

Not to mention the context. He’s Keith’s PT for two more weeks. If he gets hurt again he can see one of the dozens of other therapists in town. There’s risk involved for him. There are ethical issues abound, but none of them seem quite as messy.

He can still remember the afternoon when he went in for his follow up visit, and Matt wasn’t there. Word of their relationship had spread to the other CO-PI Monday morning. Matt had been reported to the Office of Responsible Research that afternoon. He’d been pulled off the project entirely by Tuesday.  

He can still recall in vivid detail the conversations he’d had with Institutional Review. They’d asked things that had been so deep and so personal. At the time it seemed more invasive than any boundaries he and Matt had crossed.

“Honestly, I think you should just tell him about what happened. That way he understands how serious it is for you.”

Shiro opens his mouth to speak, but Matt interjects again. Stopping his fork before it reaches his lips so that he can finish before Shiro can start. “Saying it out loud will help you too. Keep you from acting on whatever it is you’re thinking about.”

Shiro nods. Then, before he can finish the thought that never got started, the waitress finally returns with his club sandwich. He hasn’t been here in ages. It’s been even longer since he’s been here with Matt, but he wonders if the hundreds of times he’s been here if he ever ordered anything else.

They eat in silence for awhile. It takes so much emotional energy to ask for help. Shiro can’t imagine how exhausted and drained Matt must feel right now. He wants to apologize, but knows that it wouldn’t help much. Matt has always been very open and very accepting about all of it.

After the silence grows to be too much, Matt picks up the conversation once more. “Look, I don’t want to cause any undue influence, but I do hope you consider the trial. It could help a lot more people like yourself.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Matt smiles at this response, because he knows that if Shiro is thinking about something, it means he’s probably going to do it.

Shiro gets the check despite Matt’s protests. It’s the least he can do after dodging him for so long. Matt agrees, but only if they can see each other again soon. They make an awful pair, but perfectly acceptable friends.

Shiro agrees because he could use some company that isn’t Pidge.

Matt walks him to his car because it’s raining and he forgot an umbrella. Shiro says, “Thank you,” because it’s appropriate. However, two grown men weren’t meant to share an umbrella, especially if they had such an expansive height difference between them. He probably would’ve gotten just as wet if he’d sprinted to his parking spot without it.

“To answer your question from earlier Shiro, there are parts I regret.”

He says it as Shiro is about to close the door to his car. Matt stands nearby under his umbrella. Shiro shoots him a quizzical look before he remembers the bombshell of a question that spawned the bulk of their lunch time discussion.

“The way we met. How it ended.” He glances from side to side. “Maybe some of the things in between, but I don’t actually regret doing it. I hope that helps somehow.”

“I think so,” Shiro responds as he starts the car and turns the wipers on. ‘For the record, I feel the same way.”

* * *

Shiro had Monday’s session all planned out. Not just the routine. The routine at that point was well…routine. Keith was in his second to last week which meant predominantly increasing strength and honing the precision of movement he’d already gained back.

He had a discussion planned. It wasn’t quite the soul baring discussion that Matt had suggested. He did however want to accomplish a few things. He wanted to apologize for his behavior. What he did and what he said had to be consistent. He wanted to reiterate that there were very real consequences to his behavior. For both of them. He also wants to say, openly and honestly that he’s been on Keith’s side of things before, and that it can seriously impair medical decision making.

He wants to reiterate heavily just how short two weeks can be. Because he’s already shown his hand, and there’s really no use in trying to backtrack.

Then Keith comes into the office into a slim white air cast instead of his big black boot and blows all of that to hell. He’s positively beaming, and it’s a sharp contrast to the usual expression he wears. Pidge once called it a ‘placid scowl’, and he didn’t think that any other description could be more appropriate.

“Shiro,” he says in a voice that’s bright. Doesn’t indicate anything like regret or expectation. “Look what the doctor gave me.” Then, he points to the glass of the office door directing his gaze outside. “It’s small enough I can ride now.”

Seeing him so happy, seeing him so worked up…It derails him considerably, and he finds himself moving over towards the door so he can see out into the parking lot. It doesn’t surprise him at all to see the red R1 parked right next to his car.


	10. Jealous Guy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haha I've deviated so hard from my initial outline with this chapter. So I'm flying by the seat of my pants. I see one, maybe two more chapters of this.

“I’m guessing that’s why you rescheduled for later in the day?”

“Yup,” Keith responds. “My doctor had an opening earlier, and I jumped at any chance to get rid of that other one. Look,” he says again and gestures to his foot.  “I can wear both shoes now.”

“No more duct tape,” Shiro notes. His old boot was lousy with it. Old scraps from taping and retaping grocery sacks over the exposed parts of his toes so that he wouldn’t get them wet. “How was riding this morning?”

Just when he thought Keith’s eyes couldn’t get any wider or brighter they somehow do. Didn’t forget that easily.”

“Like riding a bicycle?”

  
“Something like that.  I think she needs a carburetor clean though.”

He’s going to ride the ice breaker for as long as he can. It doesn’t eliminate the tension between them, but it thins it out and makes it far more malleable. “It has to feel amazing,” He says as he leads Keith back to the treatment area. “To finally reclaim one of the biggest things your injury took.”

“So fucking good Shiro,” he responds. “I didn’t forget how good the wind felt, or how great it was to jam the accelerator and go faster than any car on the road, but it got fuzzy over time. I wish you could—“ He cuts himself off abruptly. “And getting rid of the crutches was good too,” he says in order to divert the conversation back into neutral territory. “I wanted to burn them in celebration but Lance reminded me that they were rented, and mostly aluminum so it wouldn’t really mean anything anyway.”

At that Shiro legitimately laughs. He can imagine Keith with a can of gasoline in tow, headed towards the dumpster at the rear of his shop, red faced and ready to prove something. Then, realization would hit him suddenly, everything would soften, and he’d probably feel embarrassed for a moment. “I guess this is cause to celebrate. What would you like to do?”

Keith eyes the devices in the room slowly before his eyes rest on the treadmill. “Walk like a normal person.”

Shiro swears his heart stops for a moment. He should be used to this right now. Most patients have a turning point, where everything just clicks. They can actually see their progress, and their pre-injury attitude floods back all at once. He feels pride every time it happens to a patient but today, he feels like matching each one of Keith’s big almost uncharacteristic beaming smiles.

“Let’s do it.”

Shiro can see the introspective parts of Keith in small hidden bursts, but only when he really looks for them closely. When he tightens his brow in frustration. When he clenches his jaw and doesn’t let go until some unseen force allows him to let go. It always seems like he’s constantly on the cusp of saying something profound in the trying moments between them, but is constantly holding back and letting those thoughts die somewhere deep inside his conscious.

So he’s almost knocked to the floor when Keith actually lets it be voiced. Brings it up before he can bring up the points he’s thought about all weekend and does it oh so well.

“Friday night.” Keith takes a moment to steady himself on the balance bars on either side of the treadmill.  “Something was wrong.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“Not the fact that it happened, the fact that it happened so soon. You seem like the scout’s honor, cross my heart type. So when you say after I’m finished I assumed…after I finished. So, like, you gonna tell me what’s going on? I don’t think you just changed your mind.”

Shiro all but literally clams up. He can feel a cold sweat forming down his back, in addition to his inability to pry words out of his mouth. “Two weeks isn’t very long,” is the best thing he can offer in response. So much for practiced responses.

“Glad we’re on the same page. It’s not that long.”

Shiro there’s an unspoken repetition of the previous question there. “So why did it happen?”

“I mean, yeah. I totally should’ve restrained myself but,”

“Don’t” Shio interrupts. “I’m the person in the position of authority.  I will bear responsibility.”

For a moment the only sounds between them are Keith’s steps on the treadmill.

Keith finally speaks again, “That’s bullshit.” Keith moves his good foot to the stable edge of the treadmill and in one fluid motion moves his injured leg with it so that he’s standing on the side. He reaches into the pocket of his workout clothes and returns with a hair tie pinched between his fingers. “We had an agreement. It was outside of our _dynamic._ ” He struggles over the word like he’s not sure if that was the correct one to use. “We both fucked up.”  

“Yeah,” he says with a sharp exhale. Matt thought he should tell him. He thinks it’s not the time or the place. It can wait while they finish out these last few weeks in awkward sterile professionalism.

“I don’t want things to be weird between us. Like I don’t want you to be super cold til my appointments end. We fucked up, and if you want to leave it at that we can.”

Shiro tries is best to stifle a cringe. It was exactly what he’d intended on doing.  “It won’t,” he replies with a smile “It won’t be weird.” When he says it, he believes it. For some reason, the same person he’s seen lose his patience because his ride is three minutes late, or because a bolt was stripped out, seems to have patience in spades for him. Like he legitimately cares for him beyond a sloppy kiss behind a dive bar.

It doesn’t negate the fact that he has a lot to come clean about.

* * *

“You open it.” Pidge demands after she’s rifled through the office’s mail, thrown out the junk and separated her and Shiro’s piles. He doesn’t even want to know why Pidge has her mail delivered here instead of her perfectly good apartment.

She thrusts a large ivory colored envelope into his face. It’s embossed with the local university’s emblem.  Maybe for moments like these.

“Why me? This is your acceptance letter.”

“Because I’ve opened three rejection letters this week, and honestly if it’s not an acceptance I don’t think I can take it.”

Shiro tears at the top of the envelope, “What do I do if it’s not good news?”

“Give me a raise so I can take a gap year,” Pidge deadpans.

At that Shiro hastens the opening of the envelope and hopes for the best. His hands shake as he unfolds the letter, as if it were for him. “Ms. Katie Holt….Writing to inform you.” He looks over at Pidge. She’s hunched over in a full body cringe. She’s covering her eyes with her hands, and only the bright silver rims of her glasses can be seen through her fingers.  “That the College of Arts and Sciences recommends you for admission to the M.S. program in human anatomy!”

“Oh, my god no way.” She rips the letter out of his hand. “With a part time assistanceship Shiro. Ten hours. Do you know what this means?”

“You’ll probably want to still keep a few hours here?”

“No! I mean yes, but it means I can work for two years and then try to get into med school again!” Pidge brings her hand up to face level. Shiro meets her in a high five, and then follows her hand with his eyes so he can meet her in a low five.

“That’s fantastic Pidge. Congratulations.”

“You’re taking me out to lunch today to celebrate.”

“How is this different from the two to three times a week I order us sandwiches.”

“We’re going out. Out out. I want a bloomin onion and some beer. Just one beer before you start on me Shiro.”

“It’s more your breath I’m concerned about.”

At this point, Pidge has moved on from their previous conversation. Instead, she’s busied herself with organizing and updating patient files at her desk top. “On an unrelated note, I’ve gathered that you’re signing up for the clinical,” She says with a grin.

“That is in direct violation of HIPPA,” he deadpans back.

“It’s already marked on your calendar dummy.”

“Oh.” Yes he did. And yes, Pidge does have access to his calendar for scheduling purposes.

“Do you have anyone to go with you?”

“It’s just a consultation.”

 “You should have someone go with you.”

* * *

“Shiro?”

If he asks it’s going to be weird.

“Shiro?”

But it will act as a natural catalyst for having that conversation. There was no great time to have it either _. “In addition to moral and ethical issues I have with patient provider relationships, I also have deep personal experiences with them. However, since I’ve discharged you, I hope you’re enjoying our first real date Keith.”_ Yeah. When he runs through it in his head it always sounds awful.

“Shiro!” and he’s snapped back to reality when Keith unwraps his foot from the tension band and pops him in the arm with it.

He yelps in surprise.

“What was that for?”

“To bring my DOCTOR back to this plane of existence. What if I was dying Shiro?”

Shiro purses his lips but can’t quite think of a proper comeback. It was very out of line to wander off like that.

“The other day, you said something must’ve been wrong. Like wrong with me.”

Keith abruptly stops rewrapping his foot and looks at him. His eyes have gone wide like he didn’t expect this to be brought up again. He’s got his hair pulled back again, and Shiro wants to drop everything, every ounce of control in his body and weave his fingers behind it.

One and one half weeks was no time at all. They have four more appointments after this. Four. He breathes a few times. Let’s himself cool back down.

“That’s not what I meant at all Shiro,” he offers in response.

“Okay, maybe that’s how I perceive it.” He wants to just stop talking. Let the conversation die, and pretend it never happened. He’s used to seeing people in extremely vulnerable states all the time. He never once anticipated that one of his patients would see him like this.

“I’ve been selected for another clinical trial. That’s what was wrong. I was scared, and that’s why I did it.”

Keith squints his eyes slightly. There’s a question there that he’s not quite sure how to ask.

“And, I have a lot of issues with clinical trials. Issues that influence my relationship with patients as well as my relationships…with…other people.” He chooses his words carefully at the risk of turning Keith’s PT session into his own therapy session.

At this point Keith’s mouth is open slightly. Like he had an interruption poised, but lost it somewhere in listening to Shiro try to finish. So he’s been reduced to confused, wide eyed blinking.

“Would you,” God this was stupid. “If you have time.” He’s made a really big mistake. Who the hell has ever heard of a patient going with their doctor to appointments? “Go with me to my clinical appointment?”

And before he can keep rambling and say something along the lines of, “It will help me explain literally all of this to you because I will have to.” Keith interrupts his rapidly derailing, filled with hazardous materials, train of thought. “Yeah sure.” Followed by, “When is it?”

“Thursday,” Shiro’s pretty sure he can hear himself say this, but it sounds so strange and alien coming from his mouth. “Three thirty.”

* * *

“Who let someone drop off this Husqvarna?” Lance asks as he noses around the bike. He gingerly touches the throttle and then backs away. “Was it you?”

“No Lance, it was the other mechanic who works here.” He says in an exasperated tone. It’s not Lance. It’s really not. It’s the combination of this goddamn timing chain not cooperating, Shiro, and Lance. Lance just happens to be nearby.

“I thought our policy was no dirt bikes. You know these models in particular give me a rash.”

“So don’t touch it. Go fuck with that flooded Harley or something.”

It goes quiet between them after that. The only sounds are Keith’s ratchet clicking beneath him, and the sounds of Sunny 97.7 on the radio, the city’s smoothest easy listening station. Although it was firmly _his_ turn to pick stations that day, Lance had already wrestled control of the radio away from him by the time he got in from his appointment. So he had to arm wrestle it back from him because Lance would never let him have two days in a row to make up for it.

Lance goes back to whatever it is he’s got laid out on his workbench. “Guess who’s got a date with the maintenance man at Martin’s complex?”

“I thought you hated that guy. Wouldn’t fix Marty’s shit?” Which meant Lance had to go over and fix the electric stove so that the burners and the stove would work at the same time.

“No they fired that asshole. This is the new one. He is fineeee.”

“Over the receptionist already?” Keith contorts both arms at once in opposite directions at once. He’s able to get the problematic linkage front and center and remove it from the chain.

“Well I don’t know if I’m gonna get the chance to ask her if you’re mobile again.”

“I don’t get that one at all…” It’s not that Lance has a type. He’s flexible to the point it’s amazing. He’s seen him with big masculine guys twice his size, guys with acrylic nails longer than Martin’s, girls that could be models, and girls that he’d almost call homely. But Pidge seems to teeter on that borderline between unkempt and gross. Which he knows is the opposite of what Lance likes.

“I think it’s the college girl thing. Can’t resist them, it appeals to my intellectual side.”

At this Keith has to laugh. Lance and Martin lasted one semester at the local community college before moving on to greener pastures.

“Hey,” he almost offers to let Lance drive him to his Friday appointment. The offer dries on the back of his tongue. “I need to leave at three tomorrow. I’ll stay a little later tonight to make sure nothing gets backed up. “

“Another doctor’s appointment?” Lance makes sure to look up over his bench and crinkle his nose at Keith. “Shouldn’t you be done with that this late in the game?”

“Something like that,” Keith supplies. Shiro’s request was weird. The more he thought about it, the weirder it got. But he’d wanted, so badly for some time now, to understand what made Shiro so uncomfortable when it came to those clinical trials.

Although he didn’t quite understand the big picture, he knew that Shiro was letting him in. Letting him see something that patients certainly didn’t get to see, and friends may not have gotten to see much of either. Maybe it meant that Shiro wanted to keep him around after he was discharged. Maybe it meant that Shiro needed him for something other than car repair and impromptu pool lessons. He could only hope that whatever it was, he was good enough to make the cut.

* * *

It was, as Rosalind said that morning when she’d called the shop and asked for Lance, “pissing and pouring” outside the day he was supposed to meet Shiro. Probably would be constantly for the next month or so. Spring was never like in the movies with two months of pastel flowers and increasingly warm weather. It was two months of rain followed by two days of blink and you’ll miss it nice weather.

 Shiro insisted that he pick Keith up and drive, but Keith only agreed if they could meet a few blocks away from the shop. He really didn’t want to have to explain himself to anyone.

“Were you waiting long?” Shiro asks as he closes his umbrella and sinks into the car seat.

“No, but you don’t strike me as the kind of person that’s ever late for much of anything.”

Shiro hums in response and flips his turn signal on. They’re headed towards the highway, south bound towards downtown. The going is slow because even though it rains often in this godforsaken town, everyone forgets how to drive in it.

“Mind telling me what this all is about?”

“Like I said, I’ve been selected for another clinical trial. It means I will probably get a new arm.”

“That’s a good thing right?”

“Yes, there are some issues with this one. The thumb catches constantly and the grip leaves a lot to be desired.” Shiro taps on the steering wheel like he often does when he’s trying to think of what to say next while driving. “Having my arm looked at makes me very, very nervous,” Shiro begins. All the while he never takes his eyes off the road.

That didn’t exactly explain it. He can kind of understand where Shiro’s coming from. After experiencing all for that trauma it’s justified that he doesn’t want anyone to touch it. Except, he’s almost certain that if Shiro needed someone there to help him keep calm he’d have other choices than him.

It didn’t make sense. Where were the calm, overly detailed explanations that he was so used to?

“There’s something else too. Something that we should probably discuss after what happened last week, and because you’re being discharged soon.”

Shiro lets out a long drawn out exhale as if he’s trying to calm himself down for something. For what, Keith has no idea. It’s almost frightening to see Shiro this raw and exposed.

“Before I met you, I was always very adamant about not crossing any boundaries with my patients. There’s a reason for that. It goes beyond licensure, and ethics, which are both very good reasons to avoid it.”

Keith is itching for a smoke right now if for no other reason than Shiro’s about to drop some kind of bomb, and he has no idea what it might be. He settles instead on crossing his bum leg over the other and twisting the Velcro straps of his air cast. Scratchy Velcro noises be damned.

“My first clinical trial happened at a very vulnerable time in my life. Everything seemed so raw, but at the same time surreal. Like it was a weird dream and I was going to wake back up in military barracks. So the idea of going back into that environment makes me afraid. Like I’m going to lose the control of my life I’ve worked so hard to achieve.”

Keith doesn’t know what to say in response. How could he? He struggles to respond when people say relatively tame things to him.

“There’s something else too. Something I should’ve told you weeks ago. Might’ve made all of this easier.”

At that Keith perks up. It’s another thing about today that makes Shiro’s behavior seem odd and out of character. He doesn’t imagine Shiro to be the kind of person who would be prone to lying, even if it was simply by omission.

“When I was involved in the first trial, six years or so ago, I fell for the PI.”

Keith knows he should take a moment to digest that information. Process what it really means to Shiro, and try to understand that Shiro had been trying to protect both of them from whatever he went through before. Instead, he makes the same mistake he always does and speaks without thinking.

“So what, you wanted me to come to teach me a lesson or something?”

“No,” Shiro replies almost too soon. There’s a hint of tension there in his voice to let Keith know that he’s really fucked up. Shiro exits the highway and heads for the university’s medical campus. “I legitimately wanted you to come, because I’m scared.”

Keith wants to quietly unbuckle his seatbelt, open the passenger door before Shiro can understand what’s going on, and roll out of the still moving car into the oblivion because wow, he feels like an asshole.

“And you needed to know, and decide if you’re okay with that. If….” His voice trails off.

“If what,” Keith repeats to himself, because he’s too busy feeling like an ass to really process what Shiro is saying, let alone any possible subtext that might exist there.

“God damnit I’m an asshole,” Keith verbalizes his thoughts this time because he doesn’t know if he can even begin to craft an apology at this point.

“You said it, not me.” Shiro says in a neutral tone. He makes a right turn onto campus, then another right turn towards the hospital. Finally he pulls up to a parking garage and grabs a single, rain spattered parking ticket. “Although I admit this probably wasn’t the best way to discuss it…There’s not exactly a good way to discuss it though is there?”

Was Shiro asking him if there was a good way to discuss how past relationships and past trauma shape the people they’ve become? Was that rhetorical? Because he of all people wasn’t going to be able to answer that.

“I’m still glad you’re here.”

“I’m glad you trusted me enough to ask.”

Hopefully he didn’t blow it completely.

````````````````````````````````````````

The waiting room gives him a rash. It’s everything he hates about waiting rooms all rolled into one. There are big framed photo prints of the hospital hanging up on the walls, which he thought was stupid. Why bother with putting a picture of the very building you’re in up on the wall? This place is nicer than most, so instead of sinking into sticky laminate like seats they’re made of fake leather with tacky fake copper rivets.

But Shiro wants him here right?

Shiro’s gone uncharacteristically silent since they’ve gotten inside. He can feel the nervousness radiate off of him. “Hey,” Keith tries to speak in the strongest and most reassuring tone he can muster, hopes that he can tap into some of the energy Shiro uses to convey strength to him and his other patients. “This is a good thing right? Good for you, good for your arm, good for other patients who need arms.” He squeezes Shiro’s shoulder after thinking over for a moment if the contact is appropriate.

“Yeah,” Shiro breathes again like he’s desperately trying to fight off an anxiety attack.

A good ten or fifteen minutes pass before Shiro’s called back. Shiro asks if he can go back, and he’s surprised when the nurse says yes. It’s not like Shiro’s indicated that they’re related or anything like that.

He was expecting something like an examination room when they were led out of the waiting room. Instead they were taken to what looked like a regular office. Desk, computer, two chairs on near the door, and a single larger chair on the other side of the desk.

As soon as the man behind the desk makes eye contact with Shiro he knows what’s going on. The guy could be a dead ringer for Shiro’s receptionist if he weren’t obviously a few years older. Still the resemblance is almost frightening from the same uneven and unkempt haircut to the large amber eyes behind oversized lenses.

His face lights up like a goddamn Christmas tree when he sees Shiro, and he can feel some of Shiro’s tension evaporate next to him, which should be a good thing. Anything that reduces Shiro’s anxiety is good. Therefore, this should be good.

So why does he feel like he wants to wretch? Why does he feel like he wants to take Shiro by the hand and get as far away from this place as possible?


	11. Jealous Guy II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more left Y'all.

Keith is just one degree of emotion away from shaking in angry possessiveness. This guy knows Shiro, knows him in ways that he doesn’t. Understands what he’s gone through on a level that most people, even those closest to him, probably don’t. And if he sticks around, he’s going to have to see more of him. He cycles through a series of scenarios in his head, each one both innocuous and rage inducing.

Like he knows this guy, Matt? Was going to touch Shiro’s arm, maybe take it off, and fit him with a new one. Even though this guy is a professional, probably the best at what he does given the overall amazingness of Shiro’s current arm the idea bothers him. Bothers him more than the idea of the two of them together.

 It’s clear that Shiro doesn’t feel positively about the clinical trial as a whole. Although his motivations for enrolling remain unclear, it’s unsettling that he hates the idea so much and still wants to proceed. Although he doesn’t fully understand why Shiro feels so much anxiety, he blames it on the man in front of them. It’s enough for him to decide, almost immediately that he does not like him.

Not to mention he’s afraid. He’s known Shiro for five weeks, and they’re not even dating. There’s no guarantee that Shiro will want him after next week, and maybe getting back with his ex will seem like the better option.

Everyone has exes. This was something different and far more complex.

Keith doesn’t realize how irrationally jealous he’s being until the palms of his hands start to hurt. He’s clenched his fists in such a way that his finger nails are cutting angry purple red half-moon shaped indentations into his skin. He flattens his palms against his jeans and tries not to just listen to what the man behind the desk is talking about. It’s hard though when he wants to divert that energy from his fists into some other kind of nervous tic like jiggling his leg or picking at the dry skin around his nailbeds.

He’s here for a reason, and it’s not to brood.

So he forces himself back into the present and tries to focus on what Matt is saying. Keith doesn’t quite know where he should be looking. At Matt? Shiro? Or is it perfectly okay for him to just listen while his eyes wander around the office. His eyes drift across the diplomas behind Matt’s desk, over the bookshelf facing them. He notices the numerous and boring titles there such as _Applied Mathematics I, Applied Mathematics II, Biomedical Engineering_. There are a few plants in pots against the windowsill and it looks like they could all use a quick dousing with water.

“The first few appointments will be assessments of your old arm. You’ve had it for a few years now, and this particular model has been on the market now for three. We need more data on whether or not the prosthetics can actually last the anticipated time frame. Then you’ll be fitted for a new prosthetic, and the bulk of the appointments will involve usability testing on that,” Matt begins.

“Do you anticipate the muscle contraction system will be better at detecting different movements?” Shiro asks.

“I’m not supposed to tell you that at the outset of the study,” Matt says with a sheepish grin. “But,” he refers to the large stack of papers on his desk all bound together by a single, overstuffed paperclip. “You may notice changes in,” he points at a bullet pointed list on one of the pages. “’Changes in muscle contraction sensitivity,” he emphasizes the word “changes.” “Differences in conductivity receptors, as well as grip patterns that were unavailable on your former device.”

Shiro nods.

“Wait,” Keith interjects before he can think about whether or not Shiro would want him to ask questions. He’s clearly had time to consider this, and probably doesn’t. “Could he lose the ability to certain things?”

“That’s a good question,” Matt responds. “The answer is no. All former grip patterns and other functionalities included in the model he currently has are included in the new model as well.”

He shoots Shiro a sideways glance just to make sure he hasn’t stepped over some unspoken boundary. Shiro looks satisfied, although he’s unsure if it’s because of his question or Matt’s response.

He tries not to zone back out when Matt walks him through the rest of the paper work. Really, he tries. In the end he spends most of his energy staring at the stained hardwood desk and grinding his foot into the carpet without kicking the desk.

He’s unsuccessful and his foot slips not once but twice into the desk, and it makes an undignified thunking sound each time.

Luckily, neither of the other men seem to notice or care.

The form is repetitious. Matt says, “You may leave the study at any time,” at least five times. This gets peppered in alongside other repeated words such as, “access to medical records,” and “Data collection includes audiovisual recording, handwritten notes, statistical output from usability testing.”

He has absolutely no idea what any of it means, but Shiro seems to. So he signs his name and dates it on the dotted line.

“If you have time I’d like to go through a few basic grip tasks,” Matt says as soon as he too has placed his signature on the consent document.

“Sure,” Shiro responds. “I think I could do these in my sleep.”

“I should have you run the protocol then for the other participants. I always mess up and do them out of order,” Matt responds. The dialogue between them flows freely, smoothly, with a familiarity that wasn’t there when he met him and Shiro out on the waiting room, but is undeniably there now.

Matt pulls something out of his desk drawer. It looks like a postage scale with a handle. There’s a large silver needle at one end that must move along the graduated red and black numbers along the side. “Alright, so since you’re so good at this, you tell me what’s happening next.”

“Real arm first, prosthetic arm second. Hold for five seconds so you can record,” Shiro responds. “But I’m going to guess that having your participants go through the protocol without instruction isn’t part of the procedure,” he jokes with a smile.

Keith can feel the white hot pettiness that he’d worked so hard to push back rising again from his stomach to his throat.

He watches Shiro squeeze the device first with his biological arm. The needle goes up to 120 and it holds steady there until Matt tells him to release. Then, he moves it to his prosthetic, squeezes again, and the reading 98.

Matt makes note of both numbers and plucks the device from Shiro’s grasp. “Would you like to try?” He asks and offers the device to Keith. “You might want to know more about what this is all about.”

Keith kind of wants to keep being petty, but he knows an olive branch when he sees one. He’s smart enough to know that this isn’t about him, and he’s being tested. Definitley by Shiro, maybe by the super genius ex boyfriend too. So he accepts the device, takes into his dominant hand and squeezes. He’s fairly pleased when his right hand registers at 115 and his other hand at 112. He has absolutely no idea what the numbers mean, but Shiro got a 120, and Shiro’s ripped.

“Those are great scores,” Matt interjects. “Above average for a man is 114 so you’re right in-between average and above average.” Matt takes the device away from Keith, puts it in his desk drawer and then gets a small chart. “Anything above 122 is a “very good” score, and then you and Shiro are both at “above average,” while Shiro’s mechanical arm is at “below average,” he gestures to the corresponding numbers on the chart. “Obviously that might be something we’re trying to work on improving.”

He’s got to give the guy credit. He does feel like whatever ticking jealousy bomb that was building inside of him has somehow been diffused.

“Pegboard next?” Shiro asks after a moment.

“Pegboard next,” Matt responds. From seemingly out of nowhere, Matt place a large pegboard on his desk. It hits with the loud kind of _smack_ that can only be produced from wood hitting another piece of wood. “For this task, you will use your dominant hand and followed by your non dominant hand to put these pieces,” he rifles through his desk once more and reveals a cup of wooden pegs. He dumps them onto the desk near Shiro. “Into these holes. You have thirty seconds.”

Keith finds the whole thing strange. He’s used to having Shiro watch him do stuff like this. It’s a little unsettling to be on the other side. He knows for a fact he’s probably not as half a calming and supportive force that Shiro is with his patients.

He’s seen Shiro’s prosthetic in action before. He’s seen him lift things, move things around, use it while he instructed Shiro to perform basic maintenance on his car. He’s never had the chance to watch it so intently. He’s never seen it grasp delicate objects like he’s doing now. His movements are smooth, and not unlike a biological hand, but in the end he still is able to put more pegs into the board with his biological one.

* * *

 

 “I would’ve liked a little warning,” Keith says as they walk back to the parking garage. The minute they reach the outdoors, he pulls a crumpled cigarette from his pocket and lights it despite the signs all around saying that smoking is banned on the entire campus. He needs about ten more and a drink right now, so this will have to do. “Before I sat in on an appointment with you and your ex.”

“That obvious huh?”

“The two when you talk are over exaggerated. Like you’re constantly trying not to fuck something up.” He takes a heavy drag from the cigarette and watches the orange pull down the paper leaving ashen gray in it’s wake. “Until you warm up. Get comfortable, and remember why you liked each other to begin with.”  

Shiro chuckles dryly. He doesn’t sound amused, but he might appreciates the frankness. “I honestly didn’t know I’d be meeting with him directly. Usually lab managers handle things like informed consent and baseline data collection.” Keith doesn’t miss the slightly ashamed frown that Shiro flashes when he lights up in the parking lot. “I wouldn’t have asked you to come if I did. Sorry.”

Keith furrows his brows in frustration. He didn’t want an apology. He just wanted Shiro to know that he knew. “Don’t apologize. I’m glad I came. I’d like to think I learned something.” Although right now his brain feels like the contents of the meeting have been blended together in his brain, and all he knows for sure are the awkward chunks that haven’t been blended through yet. If he were to take an exam, he wouldn’t know where to begin and would probably just list out words he remembered like “informed consent” and “randomized control.”

“I hope I was…” He snubs the butt out against a bland beige gray pillar of the parking garage as they reach Shiro’s car. “Useful in some way.” His fingers brush against the door handle and he lowers himself into the car.

“You were,” Shiro responds. “Are you okay with it?”

And Keith doesn’t need to ask for clarification. He also doesn’t need the implicit to be made explicit here. The “because you kind of have to be,” hangs thick in the air between them like the clingy black smoke from his cigarettes.

“I can see how that kind of interaction, being told what to do…How that maybe wouldn’t make for the best relationship.” He hopes he’s not speaking too frankly, but goddamit he feels like he deserves it because he, at the very least _feels_ like he passed the test. “I think I get it a little more clearly now.”

“Personally, I don’t feel like I was taken advantage of in any way,” Shiro clarifies as he starts the car. He places his hand on the headrest of Keith’s seat as he turns his head and watches the lane as he backs the car out in one smooth motion. “But I would never want anyone to be in the position where they could feel that way.”

There’s silence for a moment before Shiro speaks again. “And when people are in recovery they’re not themselves. They’re trying to become themselves again while incorporating the parts of them that changed because of injury. That might upset you, but I believe that to be the truth.”

It kind of does, but only because like so many other things, Shiro is probably correct.

“That’s not the best basis to start a relationship on.”

Keith can’t tell if that’s an extremely gentle let down or not. So they’re not physical, but they aren’t exactly nothing.

He feels the same feeling that he did the night he fixed Shiro’s car and asked to be repaid through dates, or the night that Shiro kissed him. Like he was halfway between making a really great decision and a really bad one. The same kind of feeling that you get when you accept once of Lance’s dares or eat a something from Hunk’s mystery pepper jar.

So naturally, he goes for it.

“I could probably come to more appointments. Um.” Keith interrupts himself. “I mean, if you still needed someone to go with you.”

Shiro takes his eyes off the road for a brief moment. It’s the first time he’s ever witnessed him do anything other than drive like he’s starring in a drivers’ education video. “Really? You’d consider that?”

“Yeah.” He manages to choke out.

Shiro turns back to the road ahead. “And you can keep the jealousy under control?” Shiro says it with a smile, but Keith can sense the cut of seriousness in his tone.

“Like I said, would’ve had it way under control if I had any idea.”

“It’s nothing you should be concerned about anyway,” Shiro says.

“I know.” Keith’s had a lifetime to realize that in a lot of interpersonal situations, he’s probably the problem. For the record, self-awareness doesn’t make it any easier.

“Okay then.”

They pull into the shop’s parking lot. Keith notices that Lance’s Cobalt Ducati is gone from the shop’s lot. It’s not a huge deal, but if he’d been there Keith would convince him to get dinner with him or something.

“It’s stopped raining,” Keith notes as he opens the door and steps out of the car. He leans into the cabin with the door still open.

Shiro hums in response.

“If it were this time next week give or take a day, I’d ask you to go for a ride with me. Maybe back down to the pier, or the old state road,” he makes sure to give his best cocky grin for emphasis, because all brooding from the past few hours aside, he’s feeling fairly good.

“Yeah,” Shiro says in a tone that indicates he’s only semi interested. It makes Keith’s ego deflate faster than Lance fresh off a rejection. “If it were this time…Next week plus one day exactly,” Shiro emphasizes the last few words. “I’d probably give you a kiss goodbye.”

Keith can feel his jaw drop, swears he can feel it hit the cold gravely asphalt of the parking lot. Jut when he thinks he’s got Shiro figured out he throws him another curveball. It’s going to kill him.

“Until next Friday,” Shiro looks from one side to the other, “About 9:01 or so.”

* * *

“Look I’m going to be frank with you,” She says in a tone that indicates she has neither the time nor the patience. Just wait til she gets a few steps into the five point system though. “I have neither the time nor the patience for whatever it is you’re planning,” She deadpans.

Shit. That was highly unanticipated.

“Seriously, I have a client meeting at four and I can’t have you in here loafing around and not making any sense what so ever.”

“Make sense? What do you mean I make perfect sense!” He balks.

She pushes her glasses down the bridge of her nose so that she can rub her eyebrows with her thumb and forefinger. “Not really. You come in here, when your friend doesn’t even have an appointment and start shooting off about how you’re going to make my day.” She stops the exasperated rubbing and pushes the glasses up the rim of her nose. “And to be honest nothing is going to compete with that latte Shiro bought me for breakfast. It had so much chocolate in it.”

“Okay listen….Pidge,” he lights up because he remembered her name. Usually all he knows about someone before he asks them to have a drink is that they’re attractive. He knows she’s cute and he knows her name, so that’s like 100% more than usual. Right on. “Stop thinking about the latte and start considering,” He gestures to himself. “The Lance.”

She emits a high pitched giggle and then covers her mouth with her hand. It doesn’t muffle a damn thing. “Aw man, are you serious?”

“Of course I’m serious!” He says a bit too loudly. It’s frustrating though. Accept or reject. Quickly. He’s got things to do.

She chews on the sleeve of her hoodie for a moment. He tries so hard not to get grossed out as he watches the fabric dampen with spit. “Where we gonna go?”

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a maybe. Where are you taking me?”

“I don’t know…The gelato place?” Oh fuck. The five point plan. “I have a Groupon.”

She scrunches up her face. “I don’t know.”

 “Then you decide,” He says quickly losing patience. It’s just a date; it’s not like they’re picking out new kitchen counters or something that’s actually important.

“I want to go to the chocolatier. The nice one on main street.”

“Fine.” He says a bit too loudly and a bit too curtly.

“I’m free on Sunday. Gimme your phone.”

Lance is somehow able to follow orders despite the feeling nothing but harsh cold shock that he hasn’t been turned down.

Frantically she taps at the phone a few times. “Kay, you have my number. Now get lost.”  

* * *

“Fucking finally,” Keith sighs when Lance wanders back into the shop well past their official closing time. Not that Keith exactly minds. He was able to knock out three bikes and tell their respective owners that they’d be ready for pickup first thing tomorrow morning. It’s amazing what having a lot of silence and a little focus can do for one’s productivity.

“Miss me?” Lance chides as he twirls his keys around his index finger.

“Not at all,” he responds. “What the hell are you so happy about? You’ve still got the same face you had when you left.” It’s something shitty that Lance would say, but he can’t think of a better insult on the fly.

“Just gonna brush that one off buddy,” Lance says as he wipes imaginary dirt off his shoulder. “Cause I’m actually in a good mood. If I cared I’d actually ask what was wrong with you.”

“I was in an okay mood until I got back here and you were gone for like,” Keith glances at the Harley clock on the wall. It’s a cheap dollar store implement that’s faded with time and is missing the second hand. “Two or more hours.”

Keith puts down the pencil he has in hand. He’s drafting a few pieces that he can fabricate for Peaches. The DS7 is an easy bike to get parts for, but he’s an absolute sucker for doing things the hard way. “Come on,” he grabs his keys from his work bench. “Let’s ride down the old highway til we hit the state line. Maybe even keep going.”

He can’t miss the way Lance’s eyes light up. He was halfway out of his jacket, but he shrugs it back on at the suggestion. “You sure dude? Like are you supposed to be riding so much?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.”

Keith throws all of his weight into getting the bike started. Hits the throttle so hard it almost floods. He shouldn’t be so hard on her, but damn he needs this. Needs some kind of release from all the thinking and feeling he’s had to do as of late.

As soon as they get out of the city, Keith tries to tear away from Lance. Cherry bomb is fast, but the Ducati just might be faster.

Lance revs up the engine and passes him again in an instant.

Or maybe he’s just scared.

If he is, he’s absolutely not under any circumstances going to let it ruin this for him.

It’s still cold out. The parts of his fingers that aren’t covered by his gloves are already going numb, and even though the jacket is tight against his body, he can still feel the icy air rip in between the jacket and his shirt and leave him breathless from the cold.

He cannot even express how little it matters.

The world is reduced to two twin headlights ripping through the darkness and lighting their way. The only coherent thought that Keith can hold right now is that it feels so good to go so fast.


	12. Degenerate Behavior

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is the long awaited get together/sex chapter. I've decided this story needs an epilogue so there will be one more little tidbit out Monday.

He has to go in that morning before his appointment to pick up his insurance card and get some bills to take to the post office after his appointment.

There’s an angry letter written out in delicate scrawl placed atop his toolbox when he gets into the shop next morning at the ass crack of dawn (7:15 to be precise). He and Lance are all but back to their old schedule where he comes in early, leaves early and Lance comes in late, stays late.

It says, in large letters in perfectly straight rows on paper without lines. “You’d better fucking come into work today,” Keith takes a moment to admire the large flounce of the “Y” in “you,” and how “fucking,” looks like it was written by a calligraphy instructor. The large loops, and elegant flounces…at least he doesn’t dot his I’s with hearts anymore. Which was a thing, until they got to high school and Lance realized you could get beat up for that if you were a guy. That’s what happens when your older sisters teach you how to write before you even hit kindergarten.

He tries to ignore what is definitely an exaggerated and cartoony drawing of a penis at the bottom of the page. As much as he doesn’t want to be, he’s impressed. There are detailed veins drawn down the shaft, large head, thick pubes around the balls. Lance put some thought into this.

It wasn’t exactly a secret to both Lance and Martin that today was his last day of therapy. Fuck, even Mike called him up last night to wish him good luck. He hasn’t even seen her in weeks.

Keith crumples the note but leaves it on the table. Of course he’s going to be in after this. Someone’s got to help Lance get that poor abused Ultra up and running and out of their hair. He’s just not going to get more than the minimum accomplished.

Because this is a project six weeks in the making with lots of needed and unneeded agonizing in between. He’s getting laid tonight.

* * *

 

“So,” Shiro says with one eyebrow cocked an arm leaning up against the doorframe of the treatment area.  “I was thinking today, for our last meeting we could go over your file, talk about the progress that you’ve made, and talk about progress you’d still like to make in the near future.”  He looks far better than anyone with the audacity to ask that kind of question has the right to

  
“In all honesty,” Keith hoists himself up so that he’s sitting on the examination, legs swinging off the end. It’s another move he may or may not have learned from Lance. Act comfortable like you own the space. He’s doing everything in his power to not revert back to just six short weeks ago, back to the guy who couldn’t stop staring at his therapist, the guy who’s heart started racing when his therapist did something so inconsequential as touching him. “That sounds awful.”

Shiro rolls his eyes and approaches the table. He stands about a foot away and locks eyes directly with Keith. He’s close enough Keith could extend his legs, wrap them around him and hold on for dear life while surrounded by nothing but muscle. “You’re still my patient,” Shiro states flatly. “And, you’re still in the air cast for how long?”

“Nother, two weeks,” Keith mumbles. He feels like he’s being scolded by Lance’s moms for something petty like using the decorative soaps in the guest bathroom to wash up with after a long day of replacing greasy oil filters.

“You’re going to want to keep rotating through those exercises in the coming weeks. Also need to make sure your hip doesn’t get stiff.”

“Don’t be that way Shiro,” He’s pretty sure he’s failing now…on his vow to not reduced back to the guy who hadn’t seen the outside world, let alone an attractive man in over a month.

“Be what way?” Shiro’s voice is thick like W-30 oil, and just as smooth. “Want you to be healthy after you’re discharged?” Shiro’s usual pleased expression is replaced by an asymmetrical grin that beams with cockiness. It’s not quite something like full blown want, or desire but it’s something that’s a little more unrestrained than he’s used to seeing in Shiro. He can’t wait to see more. “I don’t know, I guess I just do….have to be that way.”

Keith really wants to roll his eyes and ask if he’s not proved himself as boyfriend material yet. He knows it’s going to get him nowhere.

So he begrudgingly let’s Shiro talk him through some more exercises that he can do in limited repetitions without the air cast on.

* * *

 

At exactly 9:00 AM, Shiro closes his chart. He taps Keith on the right shoulder with the folder.  “Keith Kogane.” He taps Keith with the folder again on his left shoulder. “Of the house of McClain.” He taps Keith on the head with the folder.

Keith wants to slap it out of his hand, but the glimmer of mischief in Shiro’s eyes tell him to play along.

 “Through this ceremony you will metamorphosis from untouchable to datable. I now pronounce you, officially discharged. You are no longer my patient.”

“Oh my god finally.” He closes the distance between himself and Shiro and pulls Shiro forward by his shirt. He’s totally ready to show Shiro that he’s learned a lot spending so much time in the roughest biker bars in the city. He can manhandle with the best of them. 

“Wait!” Shiro all but squeaks. The high tone of his voice would be hilarious if he weren’t about to lose it. Wait? Hasn’t that what he’s been doing?  

Keith makes an unenthused grunt in response.

“Not in here.” Shiro grabs him by the arm and pulls him past the exercise equipment, behind the partition which divides the treatment area, and out a door leading to the alley way. Shiro’s fingers are heavy. He knows he’d see red imprints on his skin right now if he looked at his arm.

“Okay,” Shiro says with a sharp exhale when the door is closed behind them.  

Keith doesn’t waste another second. Immediately he rocks upward on the balls of his feet, wraps his arms around Shiro’s neck. His cast is still awkward, and so is the position, so he all but collapses into Shiro’s chest.

Shiro doesn’t seem to mind. His prosthetic arm is immediately wrapped around his back holding him secure. 

It’s been a few weeks. Keith thought that maybe he’d allowed recollection to give him rose colored glasses, but no. Kissing Shiro is just as good as he remembers it being. Maybe it’s better now because they can do it without thinking about power imbalances or morals.

Keith kisses him at a bruising pace and doesn’t allow him to come up for air.

Shiro’s body is stock still and hard beneath him like a large unwavering monolith, but Keith loves that he’s being so pliant letting him do exactly what he wants.

Keith catches Shiro’s lower lip between his teeth and nips lightly in between kisses and Shiro makes the _best_ sound. It’s somewhere between a surprised gasp and a moan.

He’s not gonna lie it shoots straight to his dick. Yeah, he’s gonna be that desperate guy who gets a semi from making out.

Shiro breaks the kiss and holds the side of Keith’s face with his free hand. Shiro’s eyes are dark, blown wide. It’s the first time he’s seen Shiro look this vulnerable and not be afraid of the reason why. “You’re going to be the death of me,” Shiro says after a moment.

Keith doesn’t want to listen. Shiro’s palm is close enough he could kiss it instead of nuzzling into it. He wants more Shiro, less talking.

“Before I met you, I would’ve never imagined myself…kissing a former patient in the alley.”

Keith ribs him with a soft jerk of the elbow into his stomach. “There’s plenty more degenerate behavior where that came fr-“

Before he can finish, Shiro’s mouth is on him again, this time lower to his neck and collarbone.  Shiro’s tugging at the loose collar of his cotton blend shirt.

“Fuck,” he breaths against the side of Shiro’s ear. Forget about sporting a semi after a make out session. He’s going to have a very awkward hard on when all is said and done. “Shiro,” he hisses.

Shiro alternates between licking, biting, and kissing. The alternation between softness and pressure makes his heart skip a beat. Makes his skin so hot that he doesn’t care that he’s standing outside in morning March weather in nothing thicker than a short sleeve t-shirt.

It’s amazing.

Shiro is amazing.

He refuses to let the anxiety that’s plagued him for weeks now interfere. Shiro is here. Shiro wants him. This is undeniably real.

Shiro moves up from his neck and pulls him into one final, wet and aggressive kiss. It’s sloppy and unrefined compared to the rest. It’s almost desperate.

“I have a nine thirty,” Shiro says with a tinge of regret when the kiss ends.

Keith can’t do much else other than nod. He needs a moment to calm down. Needs a moment to let things get back to normal so he can walk though the waiting room and to his bike without shame.

“Can I see you tonight?” Shiro asks. His arms are still around Keith and it feels so damn good he doesn’t want it to end even if he knows he’s getting more tonight.

“Yes,” Keith responds quickly. “Let me take you for a ride tonight.”

“I’d like that.”

* * *

Keith expected that Shiro would live somewhere nice. College man and all. Large stone walls, old red clay shake roofing, carved panels lining the trimming, this was something nicer than nice. He didn’t expect him to live in what he can only describe as an urban palace. From the curb it looks as tall and as large as one of the buildings in his apartment complex.

Shiro’s waiting for him on the curb outside an old street lamp. The wrought iron kind that is inky black and trimmed in detail at the top and the bottom.

Keith is relieved. He wouldn’t want to go up to this large house and try to find him.

“Can I even fit?” Shiro asks as he throws a leg over the bike.

“Absolutely,” Keith says with confidence. “She’s small but mighty, so we can go fast.” In fact this might be one of the first times he’s never felt nervous about being with Shiro.  Keith sinks back on the seat and revs the engine.

Keith waits for Shiro slide forward and wrap his arms around him.

This was good. Real good. “Ready?”

“Yeah,” Shiro replies. “Where are we going?”

Keith walks the bike a few steps forward and takes off slowly. For some reason, Shiro’s neighbors…the ones that live in big historical houses may not like to hear him speed out of the quaint little neighborhood like a bat out of hell.

 “I hadn’t exactly thought that far ahead,” Keith yells over the engine. “Maybe somewhere not too far so we can get back here quicker and you can invite me up for a nightcap.”

“Sounds good to me,” Shiro yells back.

Keith waits til he’s to the light, and as soon as it turns green he jams the throttle. Things are going to good to go slow.

Cherry bomb’s built for speed, she’s not really a date bike at all. Peaches is the date bike. Fast enough, but built for a passenger. Peaches is vintage and charming were Cherry is sleek and intimidating. Cherry’s the fuck ‘em and run kind of bike…Not that he’s ever had to tear out of someone’s driveway cause their boyfriend was coming home.

She’s built for speed, not necessarily two people. He has to take it slow around corners, has to make more full stops than he’s used to at left turns. It’s worth it. Every time he hangs a right a bit too fast, or accelerates suddenly on a straight shot he can feel Shiro tighten up against him. With each move Shiro somehow manages to pull him closer. 

Gradually, as they ride on, Shiro grows more relaxed. He doesn’t draw up closer each time Keith makes a turn. And they aren’t so attached at the hip anymore.

Keith’s almost disappointed.

Then, as he’s about to make the turn onto the highway, Shiro scoots forward again, and breathes hotly into his ear, “Can we go back to my place soon?”

Keith cannot deny what he feels when Shiro presses firmly against him. There’s nothing between them but Shiro’s undeniable want.

He does a U-turn in the middle of the street and almost floods the engine in response.

* * *

Shiro lives on the third floor.

It might as well be in the stratosphere when he’s got Shiro doing everything in his power to delay the process. On the first landing, Shiro pulls him into another knee knocking kiss.  On the way up to the second landing, he threads his fingers into a belt loop and tugs him even closer. It’s awkward walking up the steps like this, and in know time he’s bumping hips with Shiro. Then Shiro’s got him pinned against the railing again.

“What if I said I don’t fuck guys on the first date?” Keith asks with a hand on Shiro’s chest and a playful lilt in his voice. 

Shiro’s hands have snaked their way under his jacket and shirt and are splayed out across his back. He expects the railing to be ice cold against his exposed skin, but Shiro holds him firmly in place acting as a barrier between his skin and the wall.

 “I’d ask you to consider,” Shiro tilts his chin upward with his prosthetic and jams a knee in between Keith’s legs. His touches are like rough blows wrapped in velvet and Keith’s all but addicted. “Special circumstances.”

Keith could go back and forth like this with Shiro all night. But he was a goal oriented kind of guy and every second spent fooling around out here meant another second that he wasn’t face down on Shiro’s bed. That was a problem.

“I don’t think need to,” Keith responds. “I don’t even know if we’re going to get upstairs at this rate.” Suddenly, the contact is gone. Shiro’s all but dragging him by the wrist the rest of the way up the stairs to the front door of the apartment.

 “I’ve considered it.” Keith says shakily Shiro fumbles for his keys. “You’d better hurry up and get that door open.”

Their jackets get shucked immediately. Somehow in the confusion, Shiro manages to throw a light on so they’re not just grouping and tripping over each other in the dark. Shoes are awkwardly taken off in the hallway. Nobody should look that good when they’re struggling to take over their shoe without falling over, but Shiro does somehow.

Shiro takes him by the hand and leads him to the bedroom. “Hey,” Shiro says as he sinks his fingers into Keith’s hair. His fingers creep upward and rub softly at his scalp.

The shift in contact from lustful to tender is jarring. It pulls Keith back to reality for a moment. He can feel his toes sunken into soft carpet. He takes a moment to take in his surroundings. There’s Shiro, equal parts needy and restrained before him. There’s also a very, very large bed outfitted with a minimal frame, and a black comforter.

“How do you want to do this?”

“All of it,” Keith answers a bit too quickly. “Everything.”

Shiro chuckles. “Me too,” he says as he starts to walk them backwards towards the bed. Keith soon acutely aware of his knees butting up against the mattress. It would take no effort at all for Shiro to push him down onto the bed, but the other man stays still. “But we have to start somewhere. I’ll do whatever you ask of me Keith.”

At that, Keith’s mouth goes dry. Wishes he would’ve taken some unsolicited advice and rubbed one out before he came over because goddamn. Keith’s not one to be a blushing shy type in bed, but that particular statement pushes several buttons at once and threatens to make him short circuit entirely.

“What have you thought about doing the most? I can feel your eyes on me when you think I’m not paying attention. You’ve thought of something.” 

“I’d wanted you to fuck me,” Keith says in a throaty voice that doesn’t sound like his own. Every breath he makes is labored, and the tightness in his pants is unbearable. He’s not going to make it to the main event. He doesn’t have the patience, and he’s probably going to come the moment Shiro touches him because he’s so damn desperate.

Before he can explain, Shiro quickly wraps his arm around his back to steady him before pushing him down on the bed. “I would love to do that for you Keith.”

Before he can formulate a coherent response, Shiro’s pushing his shirt upward and attacking whatever patches of pale skin he can get his mouth onto. He peppers kisses across his stomach, his tongue traces up his sides, and finally his mouth settles on his left nipple.  Keith can do little more than grab onto the expanse of Shiro’s back and hold on.

Keith usually isn’t into having his nipples played with, but Shiro is magic conducted under a spell of warmth and muscle and the clean smell of aftershave. Keith wriggles out of his shirt by the time it’s pushed up to his armpits.

Shiro removes himself from Keith’s chest and shoots him a predatory look. Keith’s eyes wander from Shiro’s expression, down his chest to the anything but subtle bulge in his pants.

“Wow,” Keith sits up and palms his dick through his pants. There’s an unmistakable and almost obscene dampness there. “You’re almost as worked up as me.” Keith grabs Shiro’s biological hand and places it on his own hardness.

“We could come first before I fuck you,” Shiro suggests. “That way we can take our time later.”

A man after his own heart. Or dick. Or both.  It’s good to know that Shiro’s patience does have an end.

Keith tugs at Shiro’s sweater. Keith knew that Shiro 90% compact muscle and 10% smile. He’s been admiring from afar for weeks now. Just got a taste of what those muscles could feel like against his own body, but nothing compared to the full vision. He’s going to lick each one of those scars as soon as he can actually hold a coherent thought in his brain. He’s going to erase whatever pain remains there. “Yeah,” Keith breathes as he rakes his nails dully down Shiro’s chest.

It’s not lost on him when Shiro screws his eyes shut and bites his lip in response. He wants to hold on to that expression forever.

So he decides to do something about it.

Keith sits up, pushes Shiro down onto the mattress. “I’m going to make both come so hard,” and he hopes it sounds smooth cause now he’s trying to shimmy out of his air cast, which is bound to kill the mood, even just a little bit.  

From the corner of his eye he can see Shiro trying to unbutton his pants. “Stop,” he puts a hand over his crotch. Yes, it is just another blatant excuse for contact. “I want to do this.”

“Okay, but I want to take yours off too,” Shiro responds.

He shucks the air cast, and them moves onto Shiro’s jeans. The button comes loose with a simple tug, then he’s pulling at the zipper. Then, in a coordinated move that he only thought existed in porn, he’s tugging his pants and underwear down together in one fluid motion. Shiro cants his hips upward to facilitate the movement.

Keith looks at the newly exposed skin and gives a low whistle. Not just reserved for nice machines, it’s something he does when he sees something truly beautiful. Shiro’s big, and he hasn’t been with anyone  in quite some time. “Yeah, I guess we really should take our time.”

Shiro turns a shade of plum colored red from his cheeks to his chest, but what he says next completely contradicts his flustered expression. “It’s going to feel so good though,” he says as he unbuttons Keith’s pants and shoves them downward. It’s not quite as smooth as Keith’s motion. He’s still bent at the knees.

“Lube?”

Shiro scoots over to the far edge of the bed and rummages around underneath it for a moment before handing him a clear bottle with a red plastic cap. “Here.”

Keith snatches up the lube and liberally coats his hand in it. Then he moves closer to Shiro. “Hey, open up your legs.”

Shiro obeys and immediately Keith presses their cocks together.

“Keith,” Shiro moans in a sharp exhale after Keith gives them both a few experimental thrusts. “That feels amazing,” It’s a little awkward. He can’t quite fit his hand all the way around both of them, but Shiro’s right. It’s warm and wet and nowhere as good as getting fucked, but he is going to get to come with Shiro finally.

“I’m going to fuck you so good Keith,” Shiro says between breathy moans that Keith can’t get enough of.

“Til’ I’m sore?”

“No.”

Keith’s breath hitches as Shiro’s large strong hand joins his own on their lengths.

“Because I’m going to work you open Keith.” Shiro finds a rhythm alongside his own hand. “Carefully,” he says it as almost an afterthought, but it has deep effects on Keith.

“Fuck Shiro,” It takes every inch of his energy to remain on task, keep his hand going, and not just start thrusting sloppily against Shiro’s length. “I’m not going to last long,”

But from the look of things Shiro’s not going to either. He looks so delicious beneath him, red faced and covered in a thin sheen of sweat. He’s still biting his lower lip, and damn, it’s the cutest fucking thing he’s ever seen.

“Me neither,” Shiro responds.

Keith captures his mouth in a deep open mouthed kiss.

Shiro places his prosthetic hand at the nape of Keith’s neck. Shiiro sucks at the juncture of Keith’s neck and shoulder before biting down. Hard.

Keith’s coming in Shiro’s hand and Shiro’s only a few thrusts behind.

* * *

“I think the issue is, you like to make me wait,” Keith really wants a cigarette…Post orgasm cravings are real. But how can he when Shiro’s tracing intricate patterns on his chest? How can he with one hand on Shiro’s very toned, very wonderful ass? He’s not going anywhere, not even to lean out the backdoor for a smoke.

“I think we both wanted each other,” Shiro responds. “Really badly.”

Obviously, they both did, but he loves to give Shiro shit. He’s so unlike most of the people he hangs around constantly. It would take an endless amount of effort to actually get him worked up. “Yeah, well I’m not a teenager anymore. What if that was it for the night?”

“I think we’ll manage,” Shiro latches onto his earlobe and sucks. Fuck, Shiro can read him like a book. Shit like that gets him going every single time. “Besides, I’m older than you,” he says after releasing his abused ear for a moment. “If anyone should be worried about getting it up again it’ me.” And as if to punctuate his statement with an, “It’s not going to be a problem,” Shiro pulls him into a spooning position.

Keith has to smile. Angel faced, Dr. Shirogane really has a thing for rubbing his half hard dick on him.

Shiro continues to nibble against his neck and his ear. Then, Shiro’s hands are on his dick again gently coaxing his half hard length to fullness.

Keith returns the favor. He loves the feeling of Shiro getting harder in his hand with each thrust. Loves the little moans he makes in his ear while he’s teasing his slit or cupping his balls.

Keith leans into Shiro and gives him another kiss. This one is unlike the others they’ve shared up until this point. With the mystery and the edge removed, it’s slow. It starts closed mouthed and builds into something deeper, more needy.

Shiro is the first to pull away. He turns Keith fully onto his back and stares at him intently.

“What?” Keith asks finally.

“Just trying to think of a position that won’t put much stress on your leg.”

Keith wants to groan. Slap Shiro playfully and then contort himself into the most trying position he can think of. But like most other things Shiro does, Keith finds it incredibly hot.

“Might be a little boring, but I think on your back would be best.”

“Do I still get to take your dick?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then I don’t care.”

Shiro goes for the lube, long lost somewhere within the covers. He applies it to his fingers liberally when he finally finds it. “How long have you wanted this?” Shiro asks as he circles Keith’s hole with his index finger.

“After my first appointment,” Keith responds not caring if it sounds strange or not.

Shiro finally pushes one finger in. It doesn’t sting, but it’s been awhile. He needs to get used to the pressure. “Wouldn’t want to keep you waiting then.” Shiro flashes that smirk again. Keith’s torn. He can’t decide what he likes better. Needy Shiro who worries his lip til it’s red, or commanding Shiro that takes what he wants. 

“How long have you been waiting for this?” He’s not going to just let Shiro tease him into another orgasm. He wants to drive Shiro crazy too.

“Hm,” Shiro knits his brow. He begins to thrust his single finger in and out. “Whenever you get over exerted and red faced…Second meeting?”

“Second finger then,” Keith orders in between kisses.

Shiro obliges without protest. “You always thought about me fucking you?”

“No,” Keith chokes out as Shiro crooks his fingers just right. He swears he can see stars. “Sometimes I think about fucking you too.”

“I like that too,” Shiro says in a deep husky tone.

“Fuck,” Keith’s eyes go wide as Shiro begins to scissor his fingers and stretch him wide. “You’re the one who’s going to be the death of me,” he says remembering what Shiro said earlier in the day.

“No,” Shiro fires back. “Just make you beg for it.”

“Fuck,” Keith repeats as Shiro pulls him up closer and puts a third finger in.

“I could make you come just like this you know.” Shiro says as he taps against Keith’s prostate over and over again.

“Don’t you fucking dare Shiro I swear.” He can’t even think at this point. Shiro’s jammed the accelerator and taken him from zero to sixty in no time flat, and if they’re going to do it they’re going to do it.

“I won’t,” Shiro says softly as he removes his fingers. “We just have a lot to do later on.”

“Get on with it,” Keith demands at the emptiness.

“Working on it,” Shiro hums as he fiddles with a condom. 

Keith is beyond losing his patience. He leans forward, plucks the condom from Shiro’s hand, rips it open, and forces it down his length.

 Shiro reaches for more lube. Keith doesn’t need it. Shiro has made him come and worked him open and he’s never been more ready in all of his life. Keith takes his cock by the root and sinks onto it.

Their names are on each other’s tongues so that “Keith,” and “Shiro,” muddled together into one lust filled hiss.

Keith can feel a sting this time. It’s an agonizing low burn that he wants to chase to the ends of the earth…But even with all of the prep, Shiro’s too big.

“More lube?”

He must be screwing his face in a weird and contorted way. When Keith opens his eye again, he’s brought back to Earth by Shiro’s concerned expression.

“Yeah,” Keith responds from behind clenched teeth.

Shiro pulls out slowly. His prosthetic hand is pressed against his chest keeping him grounded. “I told you I’d have you beg for it but-“

“I did not beg,” Keith says. His teeth are still gritted even though Shiro’s pulled out. “I’m just sick of waiting.”

“You made yourself wait more in the process.” Shiro touches the rim of his entrance lightly. “Looks a little red, are you okay?”

“Yeah. It felt good, it was just too much you know?”

Shiro nods. “Ready to try again?”

“Yeah. Please.”

 Shiro’s got his legs hauled up over his shoulders and flush against his chest. It instantly feels better this time. “You can move now Shiro. Please,” he adds in almost a whisper.

“Sure.” Shiro gives him a quick kiss on the ankle before he begins giving Keith slow shallow thrusts. “Good?” He asks, but doesn’t slow down his movements.

“So good,” Keith manages to respond. Shiro’s close, but not quite going deep enough to hit that spot.

But Shiro’s good. So good at seemingly everything he does and realizes this. Shiro allows him to open his legs and then he’s able to go deeper and deeper until he hits the spot right _there._

And then Shiro speeds up. His thrusts are hard, rhythmic, and absolutely hypnotic. He sees Shiro above him, feels him around him, and his entire world is reduced to the place below where they’re joined together.

Shiro’s constant chanting, “Keith, Keith, Keith,” is the only thing that keeps him grounded.

Keith’s usually not one to talk much once foreplay is over, words start spilling out of his mouth as soon as Shiro starts hitting his prostate constantly. “Shiro, you feel so good,” and “God, it was worth the wait.”

And Shiro responds in kind, “You’re so tight Keith.”

Their lips meet briefly for a moment, and then Shiro’s hand is back on his long neglected cock. “Please come for me Keith.”

How can he deny Shiro that? How can he deny him anything?

“Please come, so I can come inside of you.”

At that Keith lets go. He’s coming hard into Shiro’s hand for the second time this night. He can feel himself shamelessly tighten against Shiro.

Shiro fucks him through the orgasm. Even though the condom prevents him from feeling _everything_ he can feel Shiro’s cock twitch in release within him.

Shiro lied. He was probably going to be a little sore tomorrow. He was going to love every minute of it.

* * *

“Wouldn’t have taken you for a cuddler,” Shiro says after they’ve cleaned up and the afterglow has faded. He’s all but latched onto Shiro. He’s got one leg thrown over Shiro’s legs and he’s half laying on his chest.

Keith makes a completely undignified snorting sound. “Nah, it’s nothing but kicking puppies and stealing candy from babies in between street racing.”

It goes quiet between them for a moment. Keith usually doesn’t mind a bit of silence. He spends all day every day with the biggest chatterbox in the city, but now it makes him get introspective. Makes him get mushy like day old produce. He’s lucky Shiro gives him the time of day, let him writhe around in his bed.

“Hey,” Shiro pokes his chest a few times. “Can I make you food?”

Keith’s mouth goes slack for a moment. “Oh my god. Dinner too?” He says in a dry tone.  “What planet are you from?”

“Nothing fancy,” Shiro chuckles. “Probably just a sandwich.”

So, as stupid and as messy as it sounds, they eat grilled cheese in bed together.

 

 

 


	13. The Sappy Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much guys. It's been a real fun.

_Bing Bong_

_Knock Knock Knock_

_Bing Bong_

_Knock Knock Knock_

_Ring Ring Ring_

Keith bolts upright with a start. Bad idea. He might have had one, or two, or even three too many whiskey sodas at Hunk’s place last night. He’s definitely paying for it today. It’s not just a pounding in the back of his skull. His body is kind enough to make his eyes burn too. But damn. Shiro had been fitted with his new arm last week.  The tests today revealed that the grip on his new arm was exactly equal to the grip strength in his biological arm.

And that was a damn good reason to celebrate right?

Except.

He looks at his alarm clock. It reads 11:45. And god damn fuck damn. Salmon’s graduation cookout was supposed to start at noon.

And he might have been voluntold to go to the butcher shop and pick up the moms’ orders.

The cacophony of noises continues. He stumbles for his phone. 11 missed calls. Most of them from Lance, and a few from Martin.

“Keith, you’d better be dead or incapacitated,” Rosalind calls from behind the door. Fuck. “Or I’ll kill you.”

“Coming, damn jeez,’ he mumbles under his breath. He takes the time to stop at the kitchen table where he’s thrown his cigarettes and wallet, shake a butt out and light it. It’s no secret that as the McClain’s baby, Salmon is spoiled as fuck. It’s no secret that with the last bird leaving the nest Rosalind is freaking the fuck out.

And under no circumstances should anything go wrong with this party.

“Heyyyy, Rosie,” he croaks as he opens the door.

“Don’t you Rosie me. We invited almost 100 people for this afternoon. Where’s my food? Where’s my Keith?  You’re making me do this.”  She plucks the cigarette from his hand, takes an exaggerated drag from it, and snuffs it out on the door frame. “Hung over too.”

Keith opens his mouth to speak, but she interrupts him again. “I can smell you from here.”

“Keith,” Shiro calls from over his shoulder. “What’s going on?”

Keith turns around. Normally the sight of Shiro, standing in his kitchen with one eye open and the other squinted shut with sleep would be the cutest thing ever. Normally the sight of Shiro, slightly confused and standing in his underwear would go straight to his dick. He’d say, “Baby, let’s go back to bed,” and make sure Shiro lost the underwear on the way.

But right now he just wants to curl up under the kitchen table and die.

He did want Shiro to meet the rest of the clan…Just not under these circumstances.

“Keith, who is this?” Rosalind sounds almost transfixed. There’s not a hint of accusation or condescending in her tone.

“Uh, Rosalind,” goddamn he’s too hunger over for this. “This is Shiro…My boyfriend.”

Rosalind is instantly brushing past him and before he can intervene, Shiro’s shaking her hand. While he’s still in nothing more than his underwear.

‘Hi Rosalind,” Shiro says in an unwavering voice. Like he’s already used to his crazy ass family and it’s no big deal that he’s meeting Rosalind like this.

“He’s cute Keith,” She says while maintaining eye contact with Shiro. “Is he coming today?” Which is code for something. Something deep, and complex and probably slightly irrational in the way only Rosalind can be.

“Shiro has things to do today so-“

“I’ll go,” Shiro says. “I’ll go with Keith to pick up the food too actually.”

“Excellent,” Rosalind lets go of Shiro’s and moves toward the door. “And take a shower,” she says over her shoulder. “You both stink.”

* * *

“I’m so fucking hungover,” Keith moans into Shiro’s shoulder. They’ve made it to the party, with the food. Now they have the “luxury,” of hiding at one of the secluded picnic tables in the shade. “Give me the keys to your car. I’m going to go puke behind that tree over there,” he gestures to an oak tree off in the distance. “And then pass out on the back seat.”

“No,” Shiro says in a morose tone. He looks like he’s in way better shape than Keith, but he’s also got a comically large pair of Martin’s Chanel sunglasses on. “I feel like if you got caught, it would somehow by my fault.”

Keith makes a snorting sound. “It is your fault. You bought the last round if I recall.”

“You don’t.”  

At least now that dinner’s been served and Shiro’s been paraded around like a prized show pony they aren’t obligated to socialize with everyone. Salmon’s gone off to hang with her friends. She looks younger than 17 when she’s hanging upside-down on the monkey bars. Lance and the twins are playing dominoes. Rosalind was talking up all of Salmon’s scholarships and fussing after Justin’s baby.

Shiro grabs his hand and holds it tightly. “I’m sorry, I could not be making a worse impression.”

Keith rolls his eyes. “Are you serious? Everyone loves you. Even Toni, and Toni hates everyone.”

“Hair of the dog boys?” Edith strolls up to where they’re sitting and shakes a pewter colored flask in front of them before she takes a swig.

Keith can feel Shiro cringe against him. On the other hand, he reaches for the flask. What the hell is it going to hurt? He takes a drink of the thick venomous liquid, shudders, and hands the container back to Edith.

Edith pockets the flask, and then sticks her middle and forefinger out towards Keith.

Keith wordlessly places a cigarette between them and lights his cigarette so she can lean in and light it.

“We scare this one away yet?” She gestures to Shiro after a long drag.

“Not yet,” Shiro says. It’s lacking some of his usual abundant charm given his current state, but he’s still warm and receptive to everyone.

“Good.” She takes another drag. “We might like you. Hopefully you like us.”

“Ma’am you made me a double cheese burger during the worst hangover of my life…I might love you.”

Edith gives him a dry laugh in response. After awhile she snubs out her cigarette, takes another pull from her flask, and turns to leave. “I have to see what kind of trouble Rosalind’s getting into. Make sure you say bye before you leave.”

Keith nods.

Keith lets his head fall back against Shiro’s shoulder. They were officially in the “don’t be the first to leave position.” Maybe Justin’s baby will get cranky soon and need to go home for a nap.

He really needs to go home for a nap. Preferably with Shiro by his side… 

Maybe it’s the shot of booze neutralizing the hungover part of his brain and making it revert back into temporary drunkenness. Maybe it’s the heat and the sun. Or the kids that are every fucking where that remind him that he isn’t quite as young as he used to be.

But he’s gotta say it. Can’t keep putting it off. “Love your hungover ass.”

“Whose fault do you think the first part is?” Shiro tightens the grip on his hand. “I love you too.”


End file.
